CityLab | Amy Crawfordhttps://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/2018-02-15T09:07:34-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>Gotham Greens’ boxed lettuces have been popping up on the shelves of high-end grocers in New York and the Upper Midwest since 2009, and with names like “Windy City Crunch,” “Queens Crisp,” and “Blooming Brooklyn Iceberg,” it’s clear the company is selling a story as much as it is selling salad.</p><p>Grown in hydroponic greenhouses on the rooftops of buildings in New York and Chicago, the greens are shipped to nearby stores and restaurants within hours of being harvested. That means a fresher product, less spoilage, and lower transportation emissions than a similar rural operation might have—plus, for the customer, the warm feeling of participating in a local food web.</p><p>“As a company, we want to connect urban residents to their food, with produce grown a few short miles from where you are,” said Viraj Puri, Gotham Greens’ co-founder and CEO.</p><p>Gotham Greens’ appealing narrative and eight-figure annual revenues suggest a healthy future for urban agriculture. But while it makes intuitive sense that growing crops as close as possible to the people who will eat them is more environmentally friendly than shipping them across continents, evidence that urban agriculture is good for the environment has been harder to pin down.</p><p>A widely cited <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f" target="_blank">2008 study</a> by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that transportation from producer to store only accounts for 4 percent of food’s total greenhouse gas emissions, which calls into question the concern over “food miles.” Meanwhile, some forms of urban farming may be more energy-intensive than rural agriculture, especially indoor <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129524-100-vertical-farms-sprouting-all-over-the-world/" target="_blank">vertical farms</a> that rely on artificial lighting and climate control.</p><p>An operation like Gotham Greens can recycle water through its hydroponic system, but outdoor farms such as the ones sprouting on vacant lots in <a href="https://inhabitat.com/hundreds-of-vacant-detroit-lots-to-become-worlds-largest-urban-farm/" target="_blank">Detroit</a> usually require irrigation, a potential problem when many municipal water systems are struggling to keep up with demand. And many urban farms struggle financially; in a 2016 survey of urban farmers in the U.S., <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/03/urban-farming-financial-viability-survey/471756/?utm_source=feed" target="_blank">only one in three</a> said they made a living from the farm.</p><p>Although cities and states have begun to loosen restrictions on urban agriculture, and even to encourage it with financial incentives, it has remained an open question whether growing food in cities is ultimately going to make them greener. Will the amount of food produced be worth the tradeoffs? A recent analysis of urban agriculture’s global potential, <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017EF000536/abstract" target="_blank">published in the journal <em>Earth’s Future</em></a>, has taken a big step toward an answer—and the news looks good for urban farming.</p><p>“Not only could urban agriculture account for several percent of global food production, but there are added co-benefits beyond that, and beyond the social impacts,” said Matei Georgescu, a professor of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study, along with other researchers at Arizona State, Google, China’s Tsinghua University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="542" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2018/02/USA4_editted/982ed8213.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">A MODIS Land Cover Type satellite image of the United States, similar to imagery analyzed by the researchers. Different colors indicate different land uses: red is urban; bright green is deciduous broadleaf forest. (Obtained from <a href="https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/">https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/</a> maintained by the NASA EOSDIS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center, USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science Center)</figcaption></figure><p>Using Google’s Earth Engine software, as well as population, meteorological, and other datasets, the researchers determined that, if fully implemented in cities around the world, urban agriculture could produce as much as 180 million metric tons of food a year—perhaps 10 percent of the global output of legumes, roots and tubers, and vegetable crops.</p><p>Those numbers are big. Researchers hope they encourage other scientists, as well as urban planners and local leaders, to begin to take urban agriculture more seriously as a potential force for sustainability.</p><p>The study also looks at “ecosystem services” associated with urban agriculture, including reduction of the urban heat-island effect, avoided stormwater runoff, nitrogen fixation, pest control, and energy savings. Taken together, these additional benefits make urban agriculture worth as much as $160 billion annually around the globe. The concept of ecosystem services has been around for decades, but it is growing in popularity as a way to account, in economic terms, for the benefits that humans gain from healthy ecosystems. Georgescu and his collaborators decided to investigate the potential ecosystem services that could be provided through widespread adoption of urban agriculture, something that had not been attempted before.</p><p>The team began with satellite imagery, using pre-existing <a href="https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/dataset_discovery/modis/modis_products_table/mcd12q1" target="_blank">analyses</a> to determine which pixels in the images were likely to represent vegetation and urban infrastructure. Looking at existing vegetation in cities (it can be difficult to determine, from satellite imagery, what’s a park and what’s a farm), as well as suitable roofs, vacant land, and potential locations for vertical farms, they created a system for analyzing the benefits of so-called “natural capital”—here, that means soil and plants—on a global and country-wide scale.</p><p>Beyond the benefits we already enjoy from having street trees and parks in our cities, the researchers estimated that fully-realized urban agriculture could provide as much as 15 billion kilowatt hours of annual energy savings worldwide—equivalent to nearly half the power generated by solar panels in the U.S. It could also sequester up to 170,000 tons of nitrogen and prevent as much as 57 billion cubic meters of stormwater runoff, a major source of pollution in rivers and streams.</p><p>“We had no notion of what we would find until we developed the algorithm and the models and made the calculation,” Georgescu said. “And that work had never been done before. This is a benchmark study, and our hope with this work is that others now know what sort of data to look for.”</p><p>Robert Costanza, a professor of public policy at Australian National University, cofounded the International Society for Ecological Economics and researches sustainable urbanism and the economic relationship between humans and our environment. He called the study (in which he played no part) “a major advance.”</p><p>“This is the first global estimate of the potential for urban agriculture,” Costanza wrote in an email. “Urban agriculture will never feed the world, and this paper confirms that, but the important point is that natural capital in cities can be vastly improved and this would produce a range of benefits, not just food.”</p><p>Costanza said he would like to see the researchers’ big data approach become standard in urban planning, as a way to determine the best balance between urban infrastructure and green space—whether it’s farms, forests, parks, or wetlands. That is the researchers’ hope as well, and they’ve released their code to allow other scientists and urban planners to run their own data, especially at the local level.</p><p>“Somebody, maybe in Romania, say, could just plug their values in and that will produce local estimates,” Georgescu said. “If they have a grand vision of developing or expanding some city with X amount of available land where urban agriculture can be grown, they can now quantify these added co-benefits.”</p><p>That could be very valuable, said Sabina Shaikh, director of the Program on the Global Environment at the University of Chicago, who researches the urban environment and the economics of environmental policy.</p><p>“Ecosystem services is something that is very site-specific,” she said. “But this research may help people make comparisons a little bit better, particularly policymakers who want to think through, ‘What’s the benefit of a park vs. food production?’ or some combination of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean, because it has the additional benefit of food production, that a farm is going to be more highly valued than a park. But it gives policymakers another tool, another thing to consider.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Meanwhile, policy in <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/agriculture-and-rural-development/urban-agriculture-state-legislation.aspx" target="_blank">the U.S.</a> and <a href="https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7091-Urban-agriculture-makes-China-s-cities-more-liveable" target="_blank">internationally</a> is already changing to accommodate and encourage urban agriculture. California, for example, passed its <a href="http://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanAg/Laws_Zoning_and_Regulations/The_Urban_Agriculture_Incentive_Zones_Act_AB551/" target="_blank">Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones</a> Act in 2014, allowing landowners who place urban plots into agricultural use to score valuable tax breaks. The idea has proven controversial—especially in housing-starved <a href="https://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/tax-break-sowing-the-seeds-of-urban-agriculture-growth/Content?oid=2915813" target="_blank">San Francisco</a>. Beyond raising rents, critics have argued that urban agriculture, if it impedes development of housing, could reduce density, contributing to the sort of sprawl that compels people to drive their cars more. Put urban farms in the wrong place, and an effort to reduce food’s carbon footprint could have the opposite effect.</p><p>On the other hand, businesses like Gotham Greens that aim to expand may still be hampered by zoning—Puri and his co-founders had to work with New York’s zoning authority to change regulations affecting greenhouses before they could open their first farm. As the company looks to add sites in other cities, the wide array of their zoning rules, utility access, and regulations will influence its decisions.</p><p>“I think we could benefit from more cohesive policy,” Puri said, “but it’s also a very new industry. And then there are so many approaches to urban agriculture. How does a city approach something that is so broad and diverse at this stage?”</p><p>While more data about the potential ecosystem services and tradeoffs would surely help create a more navigable regulatory landscape, Puri, like others in his industry, is also something of an evangelist, eager to put in a word for urban farming’s less quantifiable benefits.</p><p>“I don’t believe that urban farming is ever going to replace more conventional farming,” he said. “I don’t think a city is going to be able to produce its entire food supply within city limits, but I think it can play a role in bringing people closer to their food, and in making our cities more diverse and interesting and green.”</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedRegis Duvignau/ReutersA man waters plants in a rooftop garden on top of Le Bon Marché department store in Paris. Big Data Suggests Big Potential for Urban Farming 2018-02-15T08:00:00-05:002018-02-15T09:07:34-05:00tag:citylab.com,2018:209-552770A global analysis finds that urban agriculture could yield up to 10 percent of many food crops, plus a host of positive side benefits.<p dir="ltr"><span>For months, the local papers watched breathlessly as a shopping center of unprecedented proportions rose on the outskirts of Detroit. When Northland Center finally opened in March 1954, they could hardly contain themselves.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“The size of such a mammoth group of stores as Northland Center is often hard for the layman to visualize,” marveled the <em>Detroit Free Press</em>, which added helpfully that the 9 million pounds of steel that would go into the structure represented the equivalent of “4,000 autos,” while the mall would be equipped with “enough refrigeration to make 200 million ice cubes daily.” Outside stretched space for 8,344 cars, then the largest public lot in the world. And should a customer lose their vehicle among the acres of Buicks and Packards, the “Lost Car Department” could dispatch a jeep to drive the customer around to find it.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The interior of this “stately pleasure dome”—embellished with gardens and sophisticated modern sculpture—would be lined with more than a mile of storefronts. “Wives who visit the new Northland Shopping Center will never want to go home,” declared <em>Free Press</em> columnist Louis Cook. “When they are not shopping they will just sit on the benches under the trees, listening to the splashing of fountains and dreaming up new ways of spending money.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Darla Van Hoey was three years old when Northland opened in Southfield Township, an event covered not only by local outlets but also by <em>Time</em>, <em>Life</em>, <em>Architectural Forum</em>, and the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>. “Coming to Northland was a big deal,” she says. “The gardens were beautiful. We would make a big shopping trip before Christmas, and we took family there when they were visiting from out of town.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>A retired French teacher who now serves as president of the Southfield Historical Society, Van Hoey is quick to correct an out-of-towner’s pronunciation: Locals don’t say “NORTH-lund,” but “NORTH-LAND,” as if the monumental mall were actually a theme park along the lines of Disneyland. But while Northland still looms large in the minds of longtime residents—and in the history American retail—the mall’s glory days are long gone; after decades of decline, Northland closed in 2015, and a partial demolition is underway as the city of Southfield shops the land to developers. It’s a sad, if not unexpected, end to a building that set suburban architectural standards for half a century. But local leaders hope that what happens next may just offer a model for suburbia’s future.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>When it opened, Northland was the biggest shopping center in America, commissioned by J.L. Hudson Company, a Detroit department store that at the time was second only to Macy’s in sales. Northland was the creation of architect Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant who loathed the strip mall-style shopping centers then growing like weeds along America’s arterial roads. But Gruen had equal disdain for his adopted country’s unruly and soot-choked urban cores. For years, he had been thinking about a way to marry the best of downtown’s walkable vitality with the sparkling modernity of the new suburbs. Hudson’s, whose owners had both money and moxie, finally offered the opportunity Gruen had been waiting for.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“Northland really put him on the map,” says M. Jeffrey Hardwick, author of the 2003 biography </span><em><span>Mall Maker</span></em><span>. At the time, Hardwick notes, the suburbs were constrained by a “bucolic ideal” that excluded commercial activity. “People worried that it would be a blight, that it would do to the suburbs the same things it did to cities.”</span></p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/12/1600px_Former_JCPenney_with_Motown_Mural_at_Northland_Center/da18c09f7.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">A Motown mural in front of a former entrance to JCPenney as seen in 2015. (<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Former_JCPenney_with_Motown_Mural_at_Northland_Center.jpg">Nikolai Nolan/Wikimedia Commons</a>)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><span>Northland’s fundamental innovation was allowing a single developer to control every element of construction and design over a vast area (Hudson’s originally purchased 460 acres for the project, although the current site occupies only 125). The architecture was tasteful and modern, there was no tacky exterior advertising, and from a distance the brick-and-concrete structure and its acres of parking were hidden from view behind grassy berms. A network of underground tunnels, some with ceilings high enough to accommodate a tractor-trailer, kept the less appealing logistics out of sight. Beyond fashion and furniture, Gruen wanted Northland to offer all the necessities of everyday life—everything that had compelled previous generations to go downtown. When the mall opened it housed a supermarket, a bank, a beauty salon, and a post office. There was a fallout shelter in the basement and a playground beneath a geodesic dome.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“This is not just the opening of a shopping center,” Gruen—never one for modesty—declared on opening day, “but an important milestone for city planners, architects, economists, merchandisers, and the American public at large.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The model held immediate appeal—soon Hudson’s Northland was out-grossing the flagship store in downtown Detroit. “They had imagined that people were still going to go downtown,” Hardwick says, “which was a blind spot.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Gruen went on to build dozens of malls over the next two decades. Beginning in 1956 with Southdale in Edina, Minnesota, he pioneered design elements like the 2-level, all-enclosed, climate-controlled structure with central garden courts and skylights that became features of every mall in America. But by the late 1970s he had soured on the concept—the sprawl of tacky strips, parking lots, and gas stations that soon surrounded most malls went against his original vision. “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,” he famously declared.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>For Southfield, long a sleepy farming community, Northland kickstarted rapid growth. Around the mall sprang subdivisions and highrise apartments and between 1960 and 1970 the population more than doubled. Still, as the suburbs sprawled ever outward, newer, shinier malls lured the wealthiest customers away. Northland’s owners worked to keep up with the latest trends in retail, expanding the mall and fully enclosing it in the 1970s. But by Northland’s 50th anniversary in 2004—despite multiple facelifts—the number of shoppers had dropped to 9 million a year from a peak of 18 million. Tenants vanished, replaced by lower-end retailers, who disappeared in turn. The property itself changed hands repeatedly, until in 2014 when the latest owner defaulted on the mortgage. In 2015, the city of Southfield scooped Northland up for $2.4 million, less than a tenth of what it had cost to build back in 1954.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The city’s dream is that Amazon will choose the site for its second headquarters, and Southfield offered the space as part of Detroit’s bid this past fall. Mayor Kenson Siver points to Northland’s location at the geographic heart of metro Detroit, its proximity to highways and the airport, and the fact that all the infrastructure—electricity, sewers, road access—is already in place. And Gruen’s tunnels, Siver contends, would be perfect for housing data servers.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The poetry of today’s largest online retailer replacing what was once the cutting edge in brick-and-mortar may be appealing, but luring Amazon is a long shot, and the mayor acknowledges as much (“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he says cheerfully). So as bulldozers chip away at Northland three miles from City Hall, </span><a href="http://www.imaginenorthland.com/uploads/4/7/9/6/47960399/northland_redevelopment-plan_final_20161025_reduced_.pdf"><span>Siver lays out a future</span></a><span> that includes new, walkable through streets, adaptive reuse of the original Hudson’s store, medical office space for adjacent Providence-Providence Park Hospital, a central park with a water feature and a band shell, and retail and restaurants anchoring mixed-use buildings.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>If Southfield can find private partners to make this happen, Northland will not be the only dead mall converted to a New Urbanist town center. According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at Georgia Tech School of Architecture and co-author of the 2009 book </span><em><span>Retrofitting Suburbia</span></em><span>, out of some 1,500 one-time enclosed shopping centers in the United States, only a little more than two-thirds are still operating as such. About 200 are in redevelopment. A few dozen have been or are being rebuilt as mixed-used lifestyle centers, and some of these have proven very successful, Dunham-Jones says. While these developments do tend to share a </span><a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-four-letter-words-of-vibrant-downtowns"><span>certain aesthetic</span></a><span> that may eventually feel just as dated as Northland does today, she believes that they will prove more resilient than Victor Gruen’s monolithic malls have.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“I think there’s reason to be hopeful that when you insert public streets and chop stuff up into blocks with multiple owners, you’re setting up a situation that allows for much more incremental change and responsiveness to the market,” she says.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>That’s the hope of Southfield leaders, as the old-school suburb of office parks, strip retail, and single-family homes faces a future where that approach to planning seems increasingly an artifact of the past.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“Northland is never going to be a shopping center again,” says Mayor Siver. “But we have a vision. This city was built around the automobile, and we are trying to lessen that impact. Northland gives us the chance to start all over.”</span></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedNikolai Nolan/Wikimedia CommonsA Mid-Century Shopping Icon Makes Way For the Future2017-12-22T08:00:00-05:002018-01-03T11:45:28-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-548669Victor Gruen’s Northland Center set suburban architectural standards for half a century. Now, partially demolished, its next life is up in the air.<p>It was a bright, frigid morning in Ann Arbor, Michigan, two weeks before the University of Michigan let out for winter break, and the college town’s numerous coffee shops were abuzz with the gentle tapping of keyboards, the whooshing of espresso machines, the occasional chatter—and the tinny strains of 1980s and ’90s pop hits.</p><p>It’s that last element of the sonic landscape that drives Gina Choe and Libby Hunter crazy. Standing just inside a cavernous cafe where The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” competed with a sizzling griddle, jostling coffee cups, and echoing voices, Choe said, “I came in here once, and [the music] was <em>everywhere</em> around me. Everyone was talking more loudly—I couldn’t even hear my friend.”</p><p>As Choe checked a decibel meter on her phone (“65, the level of loud conversation”), Hunter mentioned that the last time she was here, she had asked a counter worker if the music could be turned off. “The manager came over to my table, and she was really nice, but she said no, because of the ‘atmosphere.’ It’s amazing how afraid they are to not have music.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="827" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/12/IMG_20171208_104935/1998d7cda.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Gina Choe checking the decibel level outside a restaurant (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>Hunter, a retired middle-school music teacher, and Choe, a 2017 Michigan graduate who is working in a research lab while she prepares to apply to medical school, do not travel in the same circles, and might never have met at all had they not come together over a mutual love of quiet spaces—and a loathing for piped-in background music.</p><p>Last summer, Choe posted on the neighborhood-based social network Nextdoor, soliciting suggestions for quiet places to work (“Most people recommended libraries, and that wasn’t what I was looking for,” she clarified). Hunter responded in sympathy, noting that she had long wanted to form a local chapter of the British group <a href="http://pipedown.org.uk/" target="_blank">Pipedown</a>, which has organized successful letter-writing campaigns against piped music in department stores and pubs. Choe said she could build a website, and not long after, <a href="https://quietannarbor.org/" target="_blank">Quiet Ann Arbor</a>, the first U.S. chapter of Pipedown, was born. The still-new group plans to assemble a database of quiet places in town and mount letter-writing campaigns along the lines of Pipedown’s in the U.K.</p><p>“My goal is no music in public places, unless it’s live music,” Hunter said. “Let’s keep music special. Music is not special when it’s part of the wallpaper.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/12/IMG_20171208_120531/5aa035dc1.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">A speaker mounted outside a cafe in Ann Arbor, playing music loud enough to be heard across the street. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>Choe and Hunter’s intolerance for piped music might seem extreme. (Full disclosure: I am writing this in a cafe where I find the R&amp;B soundtrack to be a fairly innocuous accompaniment to a double cappuccino). But it’s safe to say that most of us have been annoyed, at one time or another, by piped music—especially during the holidays, when bad covers of Christmas standards are suddenly everywhere. Although for some people, music is part of the appeal of a coffee shop or bar, they might feel differently when others’ musical tastes are imposed upon them at the airport or the grocery store, in hospital corridors or doctors’ waiting rooms, or even—thanks to the outdoor speakers some shops position above their doorframes—in the street itself.</p><p>“Most of us really like music. We just want it to be freely chosen,” said Nigel Rodgers, an English writer who founded Pipedown in 1992, and compares piped music to second-hand cigarette smoke.</p><p>Pipedown now boasts some 2,000 members across the U.K., including <em>Absolutely Fabulous</em> star Joanna Lumley, who supplied a blurb for the group’s website (“I have left shops, unable to purchase the object of my desire, because of hellish piped music”). It has also won a number of victories. In 1994, Gatwick Airport, Britain’s second busiest, agreed to turn off piped music in its terminals after Pipedown persuaded management to survey travelers. According to the group, of the more than 68,000 people who responded to the survey, 43 percent said they disliked the piped music, while only 34 percent said they liked it (the rest didn’t care either way).</p><p>More recently, Pipedown’s letter-writing campaigns have persuaded stores to turn off or limit music. Last year, the department-store chain <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/ms-turns-off-music-in-stores-as-ageing-customers-complain-about/">Marks and Spencer</a> stopped playing it, and this past spring, the grocer Asda said it would experiment with “quiet hours.” And an Australian broadcaster has announced plans to launch a Pipedown chapter Down Under.</p><figure><img alt="" height="419" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/12/RTX37WX9/7ca76f01b.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Gatwick Airport in the UK agreed to turn off piped music after a survey showed that more travelers disliked than liked it. (<a href="http://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0BXZUD8TCD4&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1415&amp;RH=898#/SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0BXZUD8TCD4&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1415&amp;RH=898&amp;POPUPPN=7&amp;POPUPIID=2C0BF1S5U1S01">Hannah McKay/Reuters</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>While many of Pipedown’s members simply dislike piped music, Rodgers noted that it can be more than an irritant. “Music you don’t want to listen to simply becomes noise, and all noise has certain effects on people,” he said, pointing to studies that show noise <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/well/live/noise-may-raise-blood-pressure-risk.html?_r=0">raises blood pressure</a> and exacerbates <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4873188/">depression and anxiety</a>, especially in people who have to hear it for extended periods (perhaps because they work in a shop where “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays on an endless loop). For those with <a href="https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/pages/What-Triggers-Anxiety-for-an-Individual-with-ASD">autism and other sensory-processing issues</a>, or with hearing disorders like tinnitus and <a href="https://www.asha.org/uploadedFiles/AIS-Hyperacusis.pdf" target="_blank">hyperacusis</a>, it can aggravate symptoms, impede their ability to <a href="http://www.physiology.org/doi/10.1152/jn.00372.2016">hear conversation</a>, and even interfere with how they get around.</p><p>“It gets confusing when the music is too loud,” said Ann Arbor resident Morry Nathan, in a downtown bookstore where soft classical guitar played over a small speaker. (“This is not too bad,” said Choe, looking at her decibel meter.) Nathan, who is both blind and hard of hearing, hadn’t heard about Quiet Ann Arbor, but he said he supported their goal. “It’s hard to keep up a conversation, and when the acoustics of the room are also bad—lots of hard surfaces—it can be jarring,” he said. “I have walked out of restaurants because of it.”</p><p>Of course, stores, restaurants, cafes, and shopping malls are not trying to torment their customers; they are trying to make money. A body of research suggests that <a href="http://freakonomics.com/media/Using%20Background%20Music%20to%20Affect%20the%20Behavior%20of%20Supermarket%20Shoppers.pdf">people spend more</a> in a store where slow music is playing and <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1966-08400-001">move more quickly</a> when music is loud; that classical music <a href="http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7467">may induce</a> customers to spend more money on luxury goods; and that impulse buyers <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov05/music.aspx">tend to spend more</a> at the mall when music is playing. As brick-and-mortar stores face the threat of online retail, some are even turning to music for salvation. Target, which long resisted playing music on the grounds that it distracts people from shopping, <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2017/06/08/now-playing-at-more-target-stores-background-music.html">has been testing</a> it at some locations, and announced this year that it would roll out an “upbeat, positive” soundtrack with “a playful personality” in several dozen new and remodeled stores.</p><p>Whether or not the psychological manipulation works, people who hate piped music bristle at the intent. “When I started Pipedown, I thought piped music did work,” Rodgers said. (He has since become skeptical.) “And I objected on the grounds of liberty. We shouldn’t have to have this mind control.”</p><p>Simply by its existence, piped music does shape our experience of public life. Sure, private businesses may do what they like, whether that’s playing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” 300 times in December or bowing to the pressure of polite British (or Midwestern) letter-writers. But by imposing a mood, whether festive or frenetic, they risk interfering with phenomena like conversation and people-watching that motivate people to spend time among their fellow humans. Background music is a buffer that can numb us to one another.</p><p>“We’re so cyber-spatially-oriented now,” said Hunter, after she and Choe had finally found a coffee shop quiet enough to conduct our interview. “And I almost think I have no bandwidth left. This is a time in our history when people <em>need</em> to be communicating with each other. Real, live talking is more important than ever.”</p><p></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedChris O'Meara/APYou can almost hear Phil Collins' "Sussudio" playing in the background.The Backlash Against Piped Music2017-12-19T08:00:00-05:002017-12-19T08:00:36-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-548399This holiday season, groups in Michigan and the UK are asking for fewer jingle bells, more silent nights in public spaces.<p>Last month, after six months of construction, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority reopened the first of three rehabbed Brooklyn stations. It had new USB charging stations, large-screen digital maps, countdown clocks, and even a new mosaic.</p><p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/thisiscitylab"><em>[Like CityLab on Facebook]</em></a></p><p>But what really caught straphangers’ <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/subway-riders-slam-new-leaning-bars-unwelcoming-article-1.3488170" target="_blank">attention</a> was the leaning bar. A slanted wooden slab set against the wall at about the height of a person’s rear end, the bar was meant to give passengers a way to take some weight off their feet as they waited for the next train. What it was not, however, was a bench.</p><p>“Are they trying to tell us something? Is this even for humans?” <a href="https://twitter.com/itspersonsal/status/908746556676984832" target="_blank">asked</a> one incredulous Twitter user. “Is leaning the new sitting?” <a href="https://twitter.com/jonmrunning/status/908389978249588736" target="_blank">tweeted</a> another. “With all the walking in NYC you need to sit occasionally.”</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The first Cuomo Station opens in Bay Ridge, 53rd St. biggest changes - leaning benches, charging ports, digital screens <a href="https://t.co/QMTIXPToM2">pic.twitter.com/QMTIXPToM2</a></p>
— Dan Rivoli (@danrivoli) <a href="https://twitter.com/danrivoli/status/906233747690926081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">leaning benches are a huge scam, i paid taxes for a real bench <a href="https://t.co/ckREJksA6M">https://t.co/ckREJksA6M</a></p>
— Anthony V. (@fascinated) <a href="https://twitter.com/fascinated/status/906689166020419585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 10, 2017</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>In an email to CityLab, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz called the leaning bar “the result of a review of best practices in transit systems around the world.” Bars take up less floor space than benches, he wrote, and serve as another option for transit riders. “They didn’t replace traditional seating in the station,” he wrote; “they supplement it.”</p><p>Despite the MTA’s protestations, some New Yorkers saw the bar as the latest salvo in what could be called the War on Sitting. As cities around the world tear out benches in an effort to deter homeless people from sleeping and drug dealers from hovering, or to force loiterers to move along, pedestrians and transit users may find fewer and fewer places to sit down and take a load off, or hang out and watch the world go by—and that’s bad news not only for tired feet, but for city life itself.</p><p>In the past few years, benches have disappeared from Uptown <a href="http://chi.streetsblog.org/2013/08/29/eyes-on-the-street-bus-stop-benches-removed-to-prevent-loitering/" target="_blank">Chicago</a> bus shelters (city officials cited concerns about loitering) and downtown <a href="http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/21/third-st-benches-spot-homeless-demolished-over-lewd-behavior/689776001/" target="_blank">Cincinnati</a> (because “lewd and lascivious behavior” was allegedly occurring behind them). In San Francisco’s <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Harvey-Milk-Plaza-s-benches-removed-4004711.php" target="_blank">Castro</a>, the local business association pulled seating out of Harvey Milk Plaza. The benches, it said, were being used as a “loophole” by people who wanted to avoid violating the city’s law against lying on sidewalks. In <a href="https://www.gwhatchet.com/2015/11/11/to-deter-crime-gw-removes-benches-outside-7-eleven/" target="_blank">D.C.</a>, George Washington University pulled up seating outside a campus 7-Eleven after university police received complaints about panhandling and harassment. “If there are benches there, there are homeless people there,” an officer told the student paper.</p><p><a href="http://instagram.com/citylab"><em>[Follow CityLab on Instagram]</em></a></p><p>Earlier this year, the London Borough of Islington <a href="http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/crime-court/four-of-islington-s-five-council-backed-smart-benches-to-be-ripped-up-because-of-phone-snatch-fears-1-5143610" target="_blank">installed new “smart” benches</a> with Wi-Fi, solar panels, and phone charging stations—but soon after the borough council announced it would remove them, due to a lack of planning permission and concerns that the benches presented “an opportunity for thieves travelling past to snatch phones and iPads.”</p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p><a href="http://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/05/to-prevent-homeless-taking-over-bus-stops-anaheim-removes-benches-around-disneyland/" target="_blank">Anaheim</a> got attention in July because of officials’ decision to remove benches from bus stops near Disneyland, leading some people to assume that the theme park requested homeless people be evicted for the sake of its squeaky-clean image. City spokesman Mike Lyster said that was incorrect—the benches were not pulled out at the theme park’s behest.</p><p>“We got into a situation where bus riders were losing access to the benches—people were basically occupying them 24 hours a day,” he said. “This at least restored the shelters for bus riders.”</p><p>Lyster noted that the city has an outreach program to connect homeless people with social services that can get them into housing; since 2014, some 800 people have found homes, he said. “But it’s a long game, and the problem grows.” Meanwhile, the bench removals had their intended effect, he said. While people slept on the sidewalk for a while, eventually, they moved on.</p><p>No one seems to be keeping statistics on the disappearance of street seating, but G.W. Rolle, who sits on the board at the National Law Center on Homelessness &amp; Poverty, places the trend within the greater context of so-called <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/how-cities-use-design-to-drive-homeless-people-away/373067/" target="_blank">hostile architecture</a>—features such as spikes to prevent people from sitting on ledges and segmented benches that don’t allow them to lie down—and anti-vagrancy laws, which criminalize sleeping in public, sitting on sidewalks, and loitering. The center, which tracks laws that affect homeless people, <a href="https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Housing-Not-Handcuffs">found</a> in a recent survey of U.S. cities that nearly half have laws barring lying down or sitting in certain places, a number that has climbed more than 50 percent over the past decade.</p><figure><img alt="A homeless man and two elderly women share a bench" height="498" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/10/AP_090714021285/1159d7a19.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Elderly women and a homeless man share a park bench in Santa Monica. (<a href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Homeless-Lawsuit/2c58257a94d44c2cb97a5f9e66e254bc/8/0">Reed Saxon/AP</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>“A physical object must occupy physical space,” says Rolle, who was himself homeless for several years. “But wherever you sit, you’re vulnerable to vagrancy citations. They don’t want homeless people to have any peace.”</p><p>Rolle is now a pastor and advocate for homeless people in St. Petersburg, Florida, a city that was once <a href="https://patch.com/florida/stpete/where-did-the-green-benches-go" target="_blank">famous for its distinctive green benches</a>. Today, St. Petersburg has one of the highest concentrations of homeless people in the U.S., and those benches have all but disappeared.</p><p>“It hasn’t solved homelessness, and the people they put the benches there for still need them,” Rolle says. “It would make the city look better if they put them back. It’s a beautiful city, surrounded on three sides by water, and more people would walk, more people would go downtown, more of the elderly would come out of their buildings, if they had somewhere to sit.”</p><p>Rolle’s observations are consistent with findings of the New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces. “Removing benches also removes some of the positive activity,” says Ethan Kent, the group’s senior vice president. “It sends a message of fear: This is a place to move through quickly. People disengage. … The most effective way to deal with ‘undesirable’ activity is to make the place friendlier for everyone else. So the bench becomes the battle line, the turning point for cities either welcoming people or designing out of fear.”</p><p>While many communities are taking away benches for fear of illegal or undesirable behavior, something else suggests keeping or even adding more of them: our country’s (and the world’s) aging population. In 2007, the World Health Organization published <a href="http://www.who.int/ageing/publications/Global_age_friendly_cities_Guide_English.pdf" target="_blank">a guide</a> to “Global Age-friendly Cities,” which noted, “The availability of seating areas is generally viewed as a necessary urban feature for older people.” Some older people surveyed for the guide expressed concern about “antisocial” elements occupying public benches. To mitigate that, the WHO recommended that outdoor seating be abundant, well-maintained, and regularly spaced.</p><p>Today, more than 500 communities worldwide are working, to various extents, on meeting the WHO’s guidelines. Surprisingly enough, the home of the infamous leaning bench—New York—has been among the most ambitious.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Ruth Finkelstein was the original director of the <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dfta/html/age/age-friendly.shtml" target="_blank">Age-Friendly NYC</a> Commission, which launched in 2007. (She is now an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.) To begin with, Finkelstein says, her group held town-hall-style meetings with thousands of older people in each borough, listening to their concerns about everything from sidewalk maintenance to gaps in the city’s healthcare system.</p><p>“Benches came up a lot,” Finkelstein says, “both people talking about the fact that it made it difficult to do their errands if they didn’t have a place to sit, and also people just saying they want to sit out in their neighborhood and watch the world go by.”</p><p>Some of the older citizens’ desires were beyond the means of the initiative, but it seemed simple enough to add more benches—especially with money from the federal government’s 2009 stimulus package available. So Finkelstein’s group worked with the city’s Department of Transportation (a separate entity from the MTA) to put benches at bus stops and at other locations with higher concentrations of older people. Then they came up with a <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/citybench.shtml" target="_blank">simple form</a> that let anyone request a bench. To date, DOT has installed 1,500 benches, with another 600 planned by 2019.</p><figure><img alt="New Yorkers sit on a bench in Harlem" height="352" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/10/601046_10151478215922887_1683383819_n/f4de099e4.jpg" width="548"><figcaption class="caption">New Yorkers sit on a bench in Harlem, installed as part of the CityBench program (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/NYCDOT/photos/basw.AbqPFX8Og7kqiAFraYO2UOObOp0Knat7ZMbyDxInWHPvLHUUYq191yRcP7SeSKfVYHJ7YKFNWsQk36JorokK3cqoVqhH9hujpUf-NvJC0tiorVWHFVIRr884XVbalNC4C9BHc-p_GtR-WF8JhvsF0fET.1502117666479524.10153538207107887.10152839426522887.10151478215922887.1508822372475720.10154199125502887/10151478215922887/?type=1&amp;opaqueCursor=AbrXpX_PEdp4vDnYM_VcM-jj7iT9ilz0oD1HEamUipIeT5XzWWneG5OUtfAFCkZIyh16rdmsORgbrP43BAsu_bjSWS-u6TD83tdAGD3xbkFJ-ODGZazPh9kb2GdoNEk3PinSLve8-ToOM6QGP_xXFXDhjW80AZyvy9r31Tw9PcH0a_R7gngWO0Ali2ggh5f0vzqT848T6-weyCtvfbKl-30wV0IiujQdV0fCXKHrsfCI2zw8rhZEbZGSMwglPQdipWgzqPUZ9wz0QzelA3lsNiJNNlPHHHVHIViOKQzwr_pa3GKK4gCD6e8EQqg344nEd2l3vcPdlZ1ennWUBSfr7DYJjyo2flotQkPZoO0Spzx_8QN1JS3TWnrHx2dx06twuhJvyR3sZ1Hk_n6iVlrhzlkT5njqQl9YqC67DJ6ySaDnS9viYmiFSgUa0EFZC3Db_QUoXU3MEEvRLzXhE7fV-2cEdy3P9CqGm7zpgChkg2w1rvzqjhAUcpw8nTwhfIXrS5ly5bL_fqH0SCaihLY8pZI70kji4AZF6LdMFAqosAc4vpKuncQSuzygsiTKjqJRp1BAjUoLVCbBozC4RH6yxT3a-o15T0kbwDq-qLS3ZtsYo8qaaunXmSNqJtWRKglTBVpVDXSZMhUbXTRKlrVSySLoFqNnuMCXjqcV9wVkCOYKQspY8ojKMqhkDTsGft6z37Q9pJKd9avF6YbDnemR9fYGB_fjh8BTgYov1idT7BM0Oo__Bv73FQEOhlhO2bzDeGaJ44jjA_hT4mgBxOmhYqD36KwqErt2XoBjW3bxnAVGNA&amp;theater">New York City Department of Transportation</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>“They just started popping up all over the place,” Finkelstein says. “People love them. People use them. And there’s nothing about them that makes them only for old people. It’s an important way of creating a town square. Old people sit on them, young people sit on them, and sometimes old people and young people sit on them together and—God forbid—talk to each other.”</p><p>New York is not the only city that, in recent years, has both given benches and taken them away. Wichita, Kansas, recently floated a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article157863504.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1508419292778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGtGaJLlouLK1Byavv41KGp-grqrw" href="http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article157863504.html" target="_blank">plan</a> to remove seating from one downtown park in an effort to drive out homeless people. But as part of its own age-friendly initiative, the city also built a new “<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/info-2014/grandparents-park-wichita-kansas.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1508419292778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHci2GwAzg3ZK_cElPlwxLVp766qA" href="http://www.aarp.org/livable-communities/info-2014/grandparents-park-wichita-kansas.html" target="_blank">Grandparents Park</a>” with plenty of seating to accommodate older people. Boston <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.wcvb.com/article/city-removes-benches-to-curb-south-station-drug-activity/8246435&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1508419292778000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFlK_nc-ujGiJDO75PCtX0GkJrrJw" href="http://www.wcvb.com/article/city-removes-benches-to-curb-south-station-drug-activity/8246435" target="_blank">claimed</a> that removing benches near one of its main train stations had reduced drug activity, but elsewhere, City Hall is proudly <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.boston.gov/departments/new-urban-mechanics/soofa&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1508419292779000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHn8DWYRBWbyzzScIy78MNLBU6i5g" href="https://www.boston.gov/departments/new-urban-mechanics/soofa" target="_blank">rolling out</a> MIT-designed smart benches with phone-charging stations.</p><p>Local governments evidently remain conflicted. But the grumbling that ensues when benches are taken away—and the positive press when new ones are installed—suggest a stalemate in the War on Sitting, for now.</p><p></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedNew York City Department of TransportationPeople use leaning bars at a bus stop in Brooklyn in 2016.Cities Take Both Sides in the 'War on Sitting'2017-10-20T11:27:50-04:002017-10-24T14:45:27-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-542643Cities are removing benches in an effort to counter vagrancy and crime—at the same time that they’re adding them to make the public realm more age-friendly.<p>The buzziest of buzzwords in urban planning is <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/01/rise-and-fall-and-eventual-rise-again-smart-city/8081/?utm_source=feed" target="_blank">the “smart city”</a>—a metropolis laced with wireless sensors that track everything from weather and water flow to gunshots and foot traffic. The sensing technology, already emerging in cities from <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/3180125/sustainable-it/los-angeles-tests-gunshot-sensors-on-light-poles.html" target="_blank">Los Angeles</a> to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-is-taking-the-smart-city-to-a-whole-new-level-1461550026" target="_blank">Singapore</a>, might communicate with smartphones to help commuters get to work more smoothly, or send data to local authorities, who can use it to direct services like police, transit, and even trash collection.</p><p>Smart cities might be efficient, but most visions of the smart city put the government or corporations in charge of all this technology. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/17/truth-smart-city-destroy-democracy-urban-thinkers-buzzphrase" target="_blank">Critics worry</a> that cities may get too smart for their own good, reducing people to data-points and dollar signs, hyper-surveilled cogs in a great machine. “The citizens the smart city claims to serve are treated like infants,” <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughts-smart-city-rem-koolhaas.html">complained</a> architect Rem Koolhaas in 2014. “We are fed cute icons of urban life, integrated with harmless devices, cohering into pleasant diagrams in which citizens and business are surrounded by more and more circles of service that create bubbles of control.”</p><p><span style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;">But what if citizens themselves could harness the smart city’s sensors and gather their own data, using it to reshape the urban environment in a way that better meets their needs? That’s the intriguing question behind </span><a href="https://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/201652494" style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;" target="_blank">Sensors in a Shoebox</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;">, a project to put compact kits of sensors in the hands of Detroit teenagers. Funded by grants from the Knight Cities Challenge and </span><a href="https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1637232&amp;HistoricalAwards=false" style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;" target="_blank">National Science Foundation</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.2px;">, it’s a bottom-up approach to urban technology that aims to empower the community, rather than the technocrats. The aim: Help citizens ask questions about their neighborhoods and come up with their own solutions.</span></p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/05/3-1/9da75b223.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Jacquie Handley works with Detroit teens on their survey questions. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>On a recent afternoon at Voyageur College Prep High School, a public charter school in Southwest Detroit, half a dozen eighth- and ninth-graders and three grad students from the University of Michigan gather in a sunny upstairs classroom to hone questions for a survey about Detroit’s riverfront. The teens and their mentors plan to use the face-to-face questionnaire alongside several of the sensor kits, which will be deployed to track pedestrian traffic, outdoor temperature, and—most important to the kids—air quality.</p><p>“I have asthma,” says eighth-grader Arianna Lowe. “If it’s windy and stuff, if there’s pollen or if it’s really foggy, you won’t be able to breathe.”</p><p>Asthma affects nearly one in six Detroit residents. The city’s asthma rate is 40 percent higher than that of Michigan as a whole, and sufferers here are more than three times as likely to wind up in the hospital. And air pollution makes asthma worse. “You can actually smell the air—it smells like cars,” says Lowe’s classmate Leachmie Santiago.</p><p>For teens and other laypeople to find engineering useful, it needs to be user-friendly and cheap. That’s where civil engineering grad student Katherine Flanigan comes in. In a basement lab on Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, Flanigan built sensor kits that would be installed along the riverfront and on the roof of Voyageur Prep.</p><p>The kits—packed in plastic cases slightly smaller than a shoebox—are built around a wireless sensor node, which is based on technology originally developed by Flanigan’s advisor, Jerry Lynch, to monitor the structural integrity of bridges. Lynch’s “Narada” node is used by civil engineers around the world. Adapting the technology for ordinary citizens required some creativity.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="499" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/05/IMG_20170523_152333/def0911fa.jpg" width="400"><figcaption class="caption">Katherine Flanigan assembles a sensor kit in the lab. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>“The Narada node has to be wirelessly connected to a large base nearby,” Flanigan says, pointing to a steel box the size of a dorm refrigerator. “In urban sensing, it’s not really feasible to have a lot of these base stations—they’re expensive, they’re big, and there’s a lot to steal. Also, they require a large solar panel.”</p><p>The solution Flanigan came up with was a cellular modem, which allows the node to send data directly to the cloud. The modem also has the advantage of requiring less power—a solar panel the size of an LP record sleeve is plenty. Flanigan designed each node to accommodate four sensors, and users can choose from an assortment that includes a thermometer, a humidity sensor, an accelerometer, sensors for particulate matter or ozone to indicate air pollution, or an infrared sensor that can spot humans or animals.</p><p>“It really can be configured exactly to what the students want. Then they flip the switch, and it’s good to go,” Flanigan says. “And the nice thing is the components are just over time getting cheaper and cheaper—some of these components cost pennies, a couple dollars.”</p><p>That’s the hardware; for the software, Lynch came up with a simple solution that is bound to appeal to a smartphone-loving generation. The sensor nodes will report directly to Twitter, tweeting out data points on the hour.</p><p>As Flanigan hustles to finish building sensor kits in time for a planned deployment in early June, Jocylen Fox, development services coordinator at the non-profit <a href="http://www.detroitriverfront.org/">Detroit RiverFront Conservancy</a>, is looking forward to seeing the students’ data. The conservancy is trying to figure out how people are using three-and-a-half miles of parkland and trails along the Detroit River, much of which was until recently surface parking, abandoned piers, and vacant lots. But currently available sensor technology was prohibitively expensive for such a large area; without this project, the conservancy wouldn’t have been able to capture enough data.</p><p>“We hope to use this data to be able to improve our spaces and the experience of our visitors—identify any areas of improvement,” Fox says. “I’m really interested to see what they are able to collect and what recommendations they have.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>The usefulness of their work has helped to motivate the teens, who are learning not only how to conduct research but about their own power as citizens. And the researchers hope the sensor kits might eventually be used by anyone seeking to make their cities smarter, whether they’re teens in an after-school program or a coalition of concerned citizens looking to right an urban wrong.</p><p>“The real goal of this project is to engage young people in identifying problems in their community and learning to do scientific research to work on solutions,” says Elizabeth Moje, dean of Michigan’s School of Education and a lead researcher for Sensors in a Shoebox. “But it’s absolutely something we can imagine going to a much larger scale. Imagine what could have happened in Flint if the average citizen had a water pollution sensor. It’s really important that we develop citizens who are capable of doing this kind of work.”</p><p>First-year Ph.D. student Jacquie Handley, who is leading the education side of Sensors in a Shoebox, is pleased by how the teens brought their own concerns and interests to the project. “There’s a lot of engineering that happens in the world that’s not motivated by the community’s needs,” she says. “I’m interested in getting out of that top-down approach.”</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedCourtesy of Katherine FlaniganThe Sensors in a Shoebox kit is actually a little smaller than a shoebox, and can be powered by a solar panel the size of a record sleeve.Detroit Imagines a Citizen-Led Smart City 2017-05-31T14:09:36-04:002017-05-31T14:09:36-04:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-528441Instead of deploying urban sensors as instruments of surveillance for technocrats, what if vulnerable communities controlled the gear—and the data?<p>In an enormous unmarked warehouse on the outskirts of Flint, Michigan, pallets of bottled water extend to the horizon in endless rows, tinted blue by the “Absopure” label shrink-wrapped around each case. This inland sea turns over weekly, trucked out for distribution throughout the city of about 100,000 people, most of whom have relied on publicly funded bottles and filters for more than year.</p><p>On a recent afternoon, Jessica Johnson and Chris Cooper stop back at the warehouse to refill their yellow box truck, then head out on a route that winds past the General Motors plant and through neighborhoods of modest prewar bungalows in the city’s northwest corner.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/city-makers-getting-to-work/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/citymakers-bug.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/city-makers-getting-to-work/?utm_source=feed">What's next in workforce development</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/city-makers-getting-to-work/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
</aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>“We’ve done 30 so far, and we have about 30 people to go today,” says Johnson, 28, a Flint native who was hired to drive trucks for the water program last April, a few weeks after being laid off from her $11-an-hour (plus commissions) job as a cell phone sales rep. This job pays $15, and it’s administered through a workforce development agency that also provided training for her commercial driver’s license.</p><p>Cooper, 33, came on board in December, hired as part of a separate community outreach program. In addition to delivering water, he makes sure that people’s filters are working and that they know how to use them. He had a previous water-crisis job installing filters, and before that he was a temp in a machine shop, where he made $10.60 an hour before being laid off. Today he brings home an hourly wage of $15.</p><p>“I like the pay,” he says, “and it’s good to be able to help our community.”</p><p>The story of the water crisis is one that Flint residents know too well. In 2014, officials switched Flint’s intake from Detroit’s municipal system to the polluted Flint River in a bid to save money. However, they neglected to ensure the water was treated with corrosion-control chemicals, which allowed lead and other substances to leach from aging pipes.</p><p>Brown and foul-smelling, the water left people with burning eyes and painful rashes, but it was a year and a half before officials took the issue seriously enough to reconnect to Detroit water. By that point the pipes were permanently degraded and many children had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/15/toxic-water-soaring-lead-levels-in-childrens-blood-create-state-of-emergency-in-flint-mich/?utm_term=.79129dfaa43a" target="_blank">catastrophic levels of lead</a> in their blood.</p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/01/IMG_20170118_144114/f1c065e56.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Cooper drops off water at a house. As Flint residents continue to rely on bottled water, grant money has created jobs for water delivery and educating residents about water quality and health. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>Michigan’s attorney general has announced <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/20/four-more-officials-charged-with-felonies-in-flint-water-crisis/?utm_term=.fa4eb2a26405" target="_blank">criminal charges</a> against more than a dozen public officials allegedly responsible for the disaster. No one can say how much longer water-quality problems will drag on, but in the last few months Flint has had hints of good news: Congress <a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/09/flint-won-funding-in-the-latest-congressional-budget-whats-next/502352/?utm_source=feed" target="_blank">approved $170 million</a> to repair the city’s water system and help defray healthcare costs, in addition to <a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/93a4866b508b4aa9a3312dac80129a25/michigan-governor-signs-budget-165m-more-flint" target="_blank">$165 million budgeted by the state</a> for lead-pipe replacement and other measures. Residents are also heartened to know that hundreds of jobs created by the water crisis are now filled by Flint residents. That’s no small thing in a city where unemployment is twice the national average and <a href="http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/2629000" target="_blank">more than 40 percent</a> live in poverty.</p><p>First on Cooper and Johnson’s afternoon list is Corean Thomas, 70, who welcomes the pair—and the two cases of water they bring—into her cozy kitchen with bear hugs. “Residents right here in Flint <em>should</em> get these jobs,” she says, as Cooper checks the filter on her kitchen faucet and Johnson checks her address off on a clipboard.</p><p>Next up is Joanne Steiner, 67, who requested 10 cases of bottled water, which Cooper and Johnson pile on her front porch. “It makes me mad that the stupid government had to create this crisis, but at least somebody’s getting paid for it now,” she says, and calls out, “Stay warm, eh!” as they head to the next home.</p><p>Last January, when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency, he deployed the National Guard to manage distribution of bottled water, water filters, and new faucets, while Red Cross volunteers delivered water to homebound residents like Thomas and Steiner. But within two months, the regional arm of the state’s workforce development agency, <a href="http://www.michiganworks.org/about-michigan-works/the-system" target="_blank">Michigan Works!</a>, began taking applications to replace the troops and volunteers with paid Flint residents.</p><p>Funded by a <a href="https://www.doleta.gov/DWGs/eta_default.cfm" target="_blank">National Dislocated Worker Grant</a> from the U.S. Department of Labor, the full-time jobs offer currently unemployed residents $12 to $15 an hour. A separate program organized by Flint Mayor Karen Weaver and Hillary Clinton called Flint WaterWorks used private donations to put 100 Flint young people to work on door-to-door campaigns and mapping 29,000 lead-tainted service lines. That wrapped up last year, but Michigan Works!, which employs both Cooper and Johnson under separate programs, is still going strong with regular job fairs. </p><p>“This is not just a typical workforce development grant—we count on these people to be here every day,” says Bridget Spencer, who manages the state’s response to the water crisis on the ground. It can be physically taxing work, she notes. A case of water weighs more than 25 pounds, and Flint’s winters are brutal.</p><p>Spencer, a state corrections officer when she isn’t attached to the Michigan State Police Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division, oversees nearly 150 local hires who run the warehouse, deliver water, staff distribution points in parking lots around the city, and educate residents about filters, testing, and health.</p><p>The program has not always run smoothly, she says, noting that it can be difficult to find employees who can pass background checks and drug tests. She also chafes at the fact that her employees, because their jobs are considered “work experience” positions, do not get benefits or overtime. “We work every holiday, and they should get some sort of compensation.”</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="467" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/01/IMG_20170118_144249/41b3fca8d.jpg" width="350"><figcaption class="caption">The state’s workforce development agency paid for Johnson to train to get her commercial driver’s license. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>The jobs are funded for a year, but they come with the promise of assistance from career coaches and the assurance that workers will be better-positioned for future employment. Cooper plans to use grants through the local Michigan Works! affiliate and any money he can set aside from his paycheck to take the classes he needs to get certified as a welder. “This isn’t really a career, but it’s good for now,” he says of the delivery job.</p><p>Johnson hopes her commercial driver’s license will be an asset when she needs to find work again, but for now she is focusing on the present. “The mission that we’re on right now, I enjoy it,” she says as she and Cooper hoist eight cases of water onto the porch of a small white house before heading back to the warehouse for the day.</p><p>Michigan officials announced on January 24 that <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-michigan-water-idUSKBN1582KV" target="_blank">lead levels in Flint’s water have fallen below federal limits</a>, but they advised residents to keep drinking filtered water until the city’s lead pipes are replaced. Johnson holds out little hope that the crisis will be fully resolved any time soon, and she plans to stay on past a year if allowed.</p><p>“I think it’s going to be a while,” she says. “I’m not sure what that means for us, but this program has been very beneficial. It’s hard to find good-paying jobs within the city of Flint.”</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedAmy CrawfordChris Cooper and Jessica Johnson in the warehouse near Flint. Both got jobs through special programs launched in response to the city's water crisis.In Flint, Providing Safe Water Is a Full-Time Job 2017-01-25T11:49:00-05:002017-01-26T16:06:45-05:00tag:citylab.com,2017:209-514118Hundreds of locals have been hired to help the city recover from its water crisis.<p dir="ltr"><span>In the 20 years after the Blackstone Canal opened in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1828, the town quadrupled in size. The goods produced in Worcester’s factories—textiles and machinery, wire and cast iron—could now be shipped to port in Rhode Island within two days. Worcester grew into a capital of the Industrial Revolution and a beacon for immigrants looking for opportunity. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The canal itself was not in use for long. It closed in 1848, made obsolete by railroads, and by the 20th century the portion that passed through Worcester had been paved over, relegated to use as a sewer. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --> </span></p><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/08/global_shifts_promo-2/0a151ed7c.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts?utm_source=feed">City Makers: Global Shifts</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>But the idea of an urban waterway, in this post-industrial age, has seemingly universal appeal. Many current Worcester residents have lined up behind a proposal to resurrect theirs. The rallying cry “Free the Blackstone” has helped to turn a once blighted area into one of the hottest spots in this otherwise unassuming city of 180,000—despite the canal still being very much buried.
</p><p><span>It’s a testament to the power of water, long the lifeblood of cities everywhere, even when the water in question hasn’t seen daylight in more than 100 years.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>In the early 2000s, Allen Fletcher, the middle-aged scion of a wealthy Worcester family, bought a vacant public school two blocks from the paved-over canal, converted it to apartments, and moved in. The neighborhood, then known variously as Water Street and Green Island, was mostly empty except for a few bars and some light industry. Occasionally, Fletcher would come home to find an old car stripped for parts and abandoned in front of his building.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>But he saw potential. The neighborhood, which as recently as the 1970s had been the city’s Jewish quarter, abutted downtown, offered easy access to transportation, and boasted a few handsome, if derelict, 19th-century mills. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The Blackstone Canal remained only as a vague civic memory, although the idea of uncovering it popped up from time to time when a newspaper columnist decided to mine local history for copy. Fletcher, a history buff himself, happened to own the local alt-weekly paper, and he emerged as the waterway’s new champion. </span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="627" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/Harding_Street_Canal_1_MTG_1/75ecc85fe.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">A rendering of Worcester’s Harding Street as it might look with a restored canal. (J.P. Raymond Studios, courtesy the Canal District Alliance)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><span>Soon after he moved in, Fletcher and some neighbors founded a group called the </span><a href="http://www.thecanaldistrict.com/" target="_blank"><span>Canal District Alliance</span></a><span>. Their weekly meetings at a local bar attracted bigger and bigger crowds, drumming up enthusiasm that culminated in a 2003 city-sponsored </span><a href="http://www.thecanaldistrict.com/images/feasibility.pdf"><span>feasibility study</span></a><span>, which laid out a plan to recreate a little over a half-mile of the canal, crisscross it with bridges, and line its banks with “lively public places.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Historical markers and a reproduction canal lock would tell of Worcester’s role in early U.S. history. There would be boat rides, new parks, and waterfront cafés.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>That was as far as things went. Although the neighborhood group helped to secure $7.6 million in federal stimulus funding for streetscape improvements in 2010, no one wanted to kick in the $30 million that backers estimated it would take to start the project. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>But the idea alone was enough to inspire local development. “What happened was, a lot of people came and said, ‘Wow, cool,’ and a lot of them started opening businesses here,” Fletcher says. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Today the old Crompton Loom Works—which may one day overlook a restored canal—houses small businesses like <a href="http://www.cromptoncollective.com/" target="_blank">Crompton Collective</a>, a vintage home goods and crafts emporium that has won social media devotees and shelter blog accolades. Upstairs, Birch Tree Bread, which opened last year, sells European-style loaves, sandwiches, and espresso to an all-day crowd. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The Canal Lofts apartments took over an old envelope plant in 2011, and the long-vacant shoe factory next door is also slated for a residential conversion. There are still empty storefronts and weed-choked lots, but some two dozen bars and restaurants have opened, and the neighborhood hosts an annual calendar of well-attended events, including “Canal-O-Ween,” a farmers’ market, and history-themed horse-drawn wagon tours. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“Even though the canal has not happened, the district has come alive,” Fletcher says. “The dream we spun in the air really had an effect.”</span></p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="267" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/IMG_0325/8e92736dc.jpg" width="400"><figcaption class="caption">The Canal District Alliance has installed a temporary, above-ground stream at its events to give locals a taste of canalside living. (Canal District Alliance)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><span>Neighborhood leaders still hope an actual canal will flow above ground once again, and the Canal District Alliance continues to push for state and federal funding for the project. The dream feels less far-fetched since President Obama created the </span><a href="http://www.nps.gov/blac/blackstone-river-valley-national-historical-park.htm"><span>Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park</span></a><span> in 2014. The City of Worcester is also facing pressure to reduce sewage overflow into the Blackstone River, which may offer funding opportunities. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Advocates point to other cities—like Indianapolis, San Antonio, and Providence (at the other end of the original Blackstone route)—where restored urban waterways have spurred hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Worcester’s success so far raises the question: how crucial an ingredient is the water, really?</span></p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="267" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/12/5011804229_261ba0731b_b/739ff03dc.jpg" width="400"><figcaption class="caption">Worcester’s Water Street, sans water, in 2010. (Jess Bidgood for WBUR / Flickr)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><span>Mullen Sawyer, the recently-elected president of the alliance, grew up poor in the 1960s in the neighborhood that would become the Canal District, and watched with sadness as it decayed into a “wasteland” by the 1990s. Now, “if you walk down Water Street, probably every fourth business is new. Every building is undergoing renovation, including some that haven’t been used in generations.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>It’s impossible to know what would happen if the canal were uncovered. As it is, Sawyer says, “Just the thought of the canal is something everyone can get excited about.”</span></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedChelsea Creekmore for Destination Worcester / FlickrA farmers' market outside the Crompton Collective in Worcester's Canal DistrictA Waterfront Revival, No Water Required2015-12-04T09:00:38-05:002015-12-04T09:00:38-05:00tag:citylab.com,2015:209-418539The Canal District of Worcester, Massachusetts, is flourishing. Now all it needs is a canal.<p dir="ltr"><span>“You’ll have to excuse us, because we’re about to serve lunch, and it’s total chaos,” says Marilyn Hurwitz, striding through the busy lobby of the <a href="http://www.town.swampscott.ma.us/Public_Documents/SwampscottMA_Aging/index" target="_blank">Swampscott Senior Center</a> toward a multipurpose room where some three dozen elderly women and a handful of men sit waiting for their salmon fillets, spinach salads, and split-pea soup. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The ladies—who, in the gracious style of their generation, wear skirts and stockings, accessorized with lipstick and tasteful jewelry—sit chatting, their walkers and canes parked nearby. But should lunch be late, Hurwitz assures me, they are capable of creating a ruckus. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“You should see the poker games,” she says.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --> </span></p><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/08/global_shifts_promo-2/0a151ed7c.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts?utm_source=feed">City Makers: Global Shifts</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>A tendency toward unruly cafeteria behavior is one thing the senior citizens in Swampscott, a seaside Boston suburb, have in common with the town’s youth, but it’s not the only thing. In fact, the airy 7,500-square-foot facility that hosts their knitting circles, card games, and exercise classes shares space with the local high school.
</p><p><span>“It’s just a positive neighborly relationship,” says principal Ed Rozmiarek. “This building is called Swampscott High School, but it’s a community space, and it was designed that way.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The town didn’t originally set out to combine its senior center with its high school, says the building’s architect, Philip Poinelli, a principal at <a href="http://www.smma.com/" target="_blank">Symmes Maini &amp; McKee Associates</a> in Cambridge. But during the early phases of planning, as his team met with officials, they realized that the needs of the town’s elderly overlapped quite neatly with those of its teenagers. At the time, the senior center was using a small Victorian house that fell far short of accessibility standards. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The senior center had a strong dance program, Poinelli recalls learning. “We said, ‘Well, we have a dance room in the high school.’ In the winter, they took seniors in a bus to a local shopping center to walk—I said, ‘Well, we have this huge field house, you could use that.’ There was so much overlap, and it just seemed to make sense.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>The building that Poinelli and his team ultimately designed is something that the architect, who specializes in schools, would like to see more often. It’s all too common for departments to compete against one another for funding, rather than joining forces, he says. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“It’s surprising. A high school is probably the greatest capital expenditure that a community will make,” he notes. “So why shouldn’t it serve everyone, from child care to senior citizens?”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>In Swampscott, town officials and the project’s architects focused primarily on efficient use of resources. Why build two pottery studios when older artists can share a kiln with teens? There was no official intergenerational programming. But students and seniors have formed serendipitous relationships since the building opened in 2007. </span></p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="463" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/10/Untitled1/736e39d1b.png" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">The first-floor plan of the complex, with the senior center shown in red (SMMA)</figcaption></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="400" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/10/Untitled2/bb70aceea.png" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">Seniors using the high-school dance room (SMMA)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><span>Members of a knitting circle taught several students to knit, for example, and high-school sports teams give presentations to the senior men’s group, sharing their strategy for the upcoming season. Kids in need of community-service hours help serve lunch at the senior center, and veterans have been asked to talk to students about their service. The senior center gets 25 free tickets to every high-school performing arts event, and last year, the seniors’ dance team performed at the high-school talent show. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“That was fun,” says Rozmiarek, adding, “Every now and then I think it would be nice to have a more formal partnership. It’s kind of an untapped resource.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>That’s a frustration that both sides feel. Hurwitz, herself a retired high school principal who now works part-time directing the town’s Council on Aging, says her staff would also like to have more formal and frequent interaction. Still, the center’s clients, who numbered more than 1,000 last year (up from a few dozen at the old center), appreciate a location that puts them at the heart of the action. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Eddie Cohen, 89, comes to the center four days a week. Sharing lunch with friends is the main draw, but he also relishes the chance to sit out front in the morning and afternoon, chatting with students as they come and go to classes.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“It’s fun to tease them,” he says. “It keeps your mind active.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Alice Campbell says having the high school next door gives her and her friends a sense that they are part of the greater community—unlike a stand-alone senior center, which might feel isolated or carry a certain stigma. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>“We like to see young people,” she says. “It’s just a lovely feeling, having them nearby. I think it’s something anyone who’s building a senior center should consider.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span>Campbell, who is 86 and has been known to arrive at the center on the back of her nephew’s motorcycle, makes her apologies before bustling away. “I have to go play bingo,” she says. </span></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedRichard MandelkornThe main entrance to Swampscott High School, which opened in 2007Why a Boston Suburb Combined Its High School and Senior Center2015-10-12T17:40:00-04:002015-10-12T17:40:22-04:00tag:citylab.com,2015:209-410149Result: a modern two-in-one complex that serves young and old. &nbsp;<p>It only takes a few minutes for a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to age me nearly 50 years, but the transformation, at least when it comes to getting around, is fairly complete.</p><p>After zipping me into a blue jumpsuit, they strap on bungee cords that make it impossible to move my arms above my shoulders and load me down with about 20 pounds of weights, mimicking the loss of muscle strength that comes by the time a person reaches her eighth or ninth decade. The outfit is accessorized with heavy gloves and specially-adapted Crocs to simulate arthritic hands and unsteady footing.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="563" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/09/20150903_112701-1/e18c6d113.jpg" width="350"><figcaption class="caption">An intrepid reporter dons the AGNES suit.</figcaption></figure><p>“Choose your visual impairment,” says research associate Olivia DaDalt, offering me a selection of goggles labeled “central scotoma,” “impaired acuity,” “tunnel vision.” I go with “diabetic retinopathy,” which reduces my sight to a blotchy blur.</p><p>After stumbling down a hallway, I labor to open a stairwell door. A slight wave of panic arises as I think about how easy it would be to lose my footing and tumble down the concrete steps.</p><p>Low-tech though it might be, AGNES—an acronym for “Age Gain Now Empathy System”—is one of the most important research tools at MIT’s AgeLab, which since 1999 has been bringing together psychologists, engineers, urban planners, designers, and other specialists to improve the quality of life for people 75 and older.</p><p>The lab’s researchers—a good number of whom are actually in their 20s and 30s—use the suit to test products and environments for age-friendliness, wearing AGNES around the lab’s busy Cambridge neighborhood and even down into the subway, which, it turns out, is a much more treacherous environment than the young and spry might believe. Designers, planners, and marketers from the corporate world have also worn AGNES as part of consultations with the AgeLab. The national pharmacy chain CVS, for example, committed to a redesign of its stores after executives realized they were laid out in a way that older adults might find disorienting.</p><p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --></p><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/08/global_shifts_promo-2/0a151ed7c.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts?utm_source=feed">City Makers: Global Shifts</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/global-shifts/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>“AGNES has been very useful,” says director Joseph Coughlin, who founded the AgeLab. “It gives you that ‘aha’ moment to feel the friction, the fatigue and the frustration of what it might feel like to be older, with multiple chronic conditions.”
</p><p>In the United States, thanks to the sheer size of the Baby Boom generation, one in four people will be 60 or older by 2025. The story is similar in most developed countries, as well as in pockets of the developing world. These graying societies will need to confront a daunting range of challenges, everything from a shortage of workers to an increasing number of cognitively- and visually-impaired drivers.</p><p>The generations entering middle and old age today will also have to rethink what it means to be old. Fewer will be able to rely on family caregivers, but many also have higher expectations about being able to remain active in their communities.</p><p>“The older adults of today—it’s not your grandparents’ old age,” Coughlin says. “They’re more educated, they have more resources, and they’re also not as polite as their parents. They’re going to make this an issue. The Baby Boomers expect to not just live longer, but to live better.”</p><p>Coughlin, a transportation planner by training, turned his attention to the needs of older adults (the word “elderly” is now out of fashion) when he was in his 30s. Though at 54 he is still a couple decades away from being part of the AgeLab’s target demographic, in recent years he has become a sort of guru of aging, and his cultivated persona—relentless enthusiasm and a signature bowtie—now turns up everywhere from TED conferences to the Huffington Post, where he writes a regular column on the future of aging.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="357" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/09/Joseph_Coughlin_MIT_AgeLab/dbfee9710.jpg" width="350"><figcaption class="caption">Joseph F. Coughlin, the director of MIT AgeLab</figcaption></figure><p>His message, to businesses, municipalities and the public, is that old age is coming, and we’d better plan for it now.</p><p>“As individuals and as policy-makers, we have a difficult time imagining the future,” Coughlin says. “Demographics is destiny, but we’ve done remarkably little to figure out what we’re going to do.”</p><p>Some of the research coming out of the AgeLab may help to chip away at the problem of what Coughlin calls “disruptive demographics.” Engineers are working on <a href="http://agelab.mit.edu/user-requirements-robotic-autonomous-wheelchair-long-term-care-setting" target="_blank">autonomous robotic wheelchairs</a> and an <a href="http://agelab.mit.edu/ehome" target="_blank">in-home system</a> to monitor people with dementia. Psychologists and designers work with regular focus groups, asking older people directly how they compensate for the losses that come with age, and what technologies or policies would make their lives better.</p><p>Researchers are partnering with colleagues in India and Japan to track the daily lives of older people in multi-generational households and to examine whether making appliances and electronics seem more human helps older people to use them.</p><p>For Coughlin, it was the issue of older drivers that first persuaded him to dedicate his career to aging. He is currently working on a book about the politics behind how long people stay behind the wheel, and AgeLab has created a number of tools, including a driving simulator called “Miss Daisy” to study the problem and assess various technological interventions. (The U.S. Department of Transportation<span> is one of the lab’s major funders.)</span></p><p>Driverless cars might be the eventual solution, Coughlin says, but that transition will take longer than the current generation can wait. Older people might also be encouraged to move into big cities, where transit is well-developed, but despite the attractiveness of that idea, Coughlin says it’s small cities and college towns that are likely to see the greatest increase in older people. And these places will need to <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/06/next-big-infrastructure-crisis-age-proofing-america/5865/?utm_source=feed" target="_blank">rethink their entire approach</a> to planning if they are to accommodate their aging populations.</p><p>What does an age-friendly community look like? It might be a bit different than a young urban planner would envision. Post-doctoral researcher Katharina König, who arrived at the AgeLab this past summer from Berlin, says older people often have concerns that conflict with the ideals of contemporary urbanism.</p><p>“They have a very different kind of view,” she says. “We say, ‘Make the streets narrow to slow down traffic,’ but they’re worried about snow piling up and blocking their paths. We want everyone to ride bikes, but they are afraid of bikes.” (Cyclists seem frighteningly quick and unpredictable, especially to people who came of age in a car-centric society like the United States, she explains.)</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="625" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/09/shutterstock_228358099/2302fbfbe.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">Older adults can be apprehensive about narrow streets and cyclists darting out in front of them, according to researcher Katharina König. Good lighting and street-facing businesses can help them feel safer. (<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-816730p1.html">Nejc Vesel</a> / <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/">Shutterstock.com</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>König, who holds a doctorate in psychology, is currently working to analyze, through interviews and GPS tracking, the impact of neighborhood design on the daily lives of older adults, and how cognitive decline and vision impairment affect one’s perception of the environment. While she has found that older people see the city differently than the young, König also believes that making cities work for older people can, if done right, lead to cities that work better for everyone.</p><p>Better lighting and more street-facing businesses would be a good start, she says, noting that older people are more concerned about their physical safety than younger people. Meanwhile, more benches and shade would help them cope with the fatigue that often prevents them from walking long distances. “We need to be more aware of how much effort it takes for people to move,” she says. “And if you think about older people, you keep everyone in mind.”</p><p>Flashier ideas—like <a href="http://bigthink.com/disruptive-demographics/from-meals-on-wheels-to-dinner-by-drone" target="_blank">replacing</a> “Meals on Wheels” with drone delivery, or building <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8507049/robear-robot-bear-japan-elderly" target="_blank">robots to care for the sick</a>—might get more attention, but much of what we’ll need to cope with what some have called the “silver tsunami” is fairly simple and, in some ways, more difficult.</p><p>The key, Coughlin and other AgeLab researchers say, is getting everyone, not only planners and policy-makers, to recognize that anticipating the needs of older people can make life better for all of us. This is where tools like AGNES are useful, and it’s why Coughlin has worked so hard to put the AgeLab’s work before the public eye.</p><p>“This is not about taking from the young and giving to the old,” Coughlin says. “The fact of the matter is, with any luck, all of us get to be old. So I don’t want us to be age-friendly. I want us to be age-ready. And then we’ll be ready for everyone.”</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedMIT AgeLabMiss Daisy, a simulator used to evaluate car technology, cognitive distraction, and the effects of disease and medication on drivers. Prototyping the Age-Ready City 2015-09-15T09:33:42-04:002015-09-15T09:33:43-04:00tag:citylab.com,2015:209-405100At MIT&rsquo;s AgeLab, researchers work on autonomous wheelchairs, neighborhood design for the cognitively impaired, and a host of other strategies to prepare for the &ldquo;silver tsunami.&rdquo;<p>When Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston, South Carolina, in 1989, its Category 4 winds carried off nearly every roof in town, leaving homes and businesses to be flooded by torrential rain. Not since the earthquake of 1886 had the city seen such devastation, and as residents set about rebuilding, they soon realized they had another problem on their hands: a shortage of artisans trained in skills like masonry, ironwork, and plastering, necessary to repair the city's famous historic buildings.</p><p>These trades had traditionally been passed down by skilled craftsmen to their sons or apprentices, but that old system had long since been fading away. "It was a recognition that a generation of teachers had diminished," says Mayor Joe Riley, who has been in office since 1975.</p><p>Charleston would recover from Hugo, but city leaders, newly appreciative of high-quality craftsmanship, decided that something had to be done to prevent traditional building arts from disappearing for good. So Riley and a group of local preservationists worked together to found a college. It took a while—the first class graduated in 2009—but today the <a href="http://buildingartscollege.us/" target="_blank">American College of the Building Arts</a> (ACBA) is the only school in the United States to offer a bachelor's degree in traditional building trades.</p><div class="city-makers-embed-code">
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<p><span style="line-height: 1.52941;">Every student in the college majors in building arts, but can choose one of six specializations: architectural stone, carpentry, forged architectural iron, masonry, plasterwork, or timber framing. The college seeks to combine a traditional liberal arts curriculum with intensive crafts training, often teaching disciplines like history or math by way of the latter; for example, history is taught with an architectural history focus. </span></p>
<p>"The graduate here has learned both the art and the science of preservation and new construction,"<span style="line-height: 1.52941;"> says Colby M. Broadwater III, a retired Army lieutenant general brought in as president in 2008 to apply some <a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120915/PC12/120919531" target="_blank">military discipline</a> to the school's finances.</span> "How to build a business, the drawing and drafting that underlies all of it … the language, the math that supports the building functions, the science of why materials fail—all of those things wrapped into a liberal arts and science education."</p>
</div><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="705" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/02/1_Students_and_Professor_copy/491470126.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">An ACBA team crafts a new plaster ceiling on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. From left to right: Daniella Helline, Prof. Patrick Webb, Jacqueline Urgo, and Alex Joyce (ACBA)</figcaption></figure><p>Broadwater acknowledges that the college had a rocky first few years, with <a href="http://www.adjunctnation.com/2010/05/01/69-eight-adjuncts-at-american-college-of-the-building-arts-sue-for-back-pay/" target="_blank">budget shortfalls</a> and administrative upheaval, but its educational program has won wide praise <a href="http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2009/september-october/hands-on-education.html" target="_blank">from preservation advocates</a>. In the long run, he argues, the school's mission is about environmental conservation as much as it is about historic preservation, since graduates will be able to sustain careful craftsmanship in an era of aesthetically identical strip malls and vinyl-clad McMansions.</p><p>"Most of the work they're doing is new construction,” he says. "If you're building new buildings that aren't designed to be torn down in 50 years, you're not filling up landfills."</p><p>The college's current main campus is Charleston's 1802 jail, a handsome, crenellated brick structure where the Confederacy used to hold Union prisoners during the Civil War. It had been vacant for almost 50 years when administrators bought it in 2000, and over the years, students have helped rehabilitate it. This year, if all goes as planned, the college will move into the derelict 1897 Trolley Barn, a much larger space that <a href="http://www.charlestonbusiness.com/news/53126-american-college-of-the-building-arts-buys-trolley-barn-property-from-city" target="_blank">the city sold to ACBA in November for a nominal $10</a>.</p><p>But the symbiotic relationship between the college and its city extends further than donated real estate. "Of all the cities that would have a building college, it makes the most sense that it would be Charleston," Mayor Riley says, noting that the city was an early locus of historic preservation. The city also serves as an open classroom for students, who write case studies of historic structures around town.</p><p>"I didn't know much about architecture when I started school," admits senior James Hess. "But after four years, I find myself constantly wandering around looking at buildings. This is a wonderful city for that. You would be hard-pressed to find a place as perfect as Charleston."</p><p>Hess is typical of the college's 43 students, whose average age is 23 and who often come to the college after a previous stint in higher education. After graduating from high school in Sumter, South Carolina, Hess followed a path well trodden by smart middle-class kids who aren't sure what they want to do with their lives—he enrolled in a conventional liberal arts college.</p><p>Four years later, he graduated with a degree in English and German, along with the certainty that he never wanted to work in an office. He learned about ACBA through a friend and enrolled the very next semester, choosing as his major the challenging trade of timber framing.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="308" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/02/IMG_1970/2db9ca76b.jpg" width="400"><figcaption class="caption">James Hess at work during an internship at Lincoln Cathedral in the UK (ACBA)</figcaption></figure><p>Hess, who doesn't graduate until this spring, already has three job offers. Although graduates are in demand, the college has struggled to attract as many students as it needs for long-term stability. That is in part because ACBA is still working to gain accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, a lengthy process that Broadwater hopes will be resolved this year. The next goal, he says, is to grow to about 180 to 200 students, a population that the renovated Trolley Barn will easily accommodate.</p><p>"The Trolley Barn gives them a future," Mayor Riley says. The city wanted to create an institution that would last, and he's confident that it will. "We'll continue to support them, but I think they're on their way."</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedStokkete / Shutterstock.comThe College of Lost Arts2015-02-20T13:52:00-05:002015-02-22T18:16:53-05:00tag:citylab.com,2015:209-385644A small college in Charleston, South Carolina, seeks to revive the centuries-old fine building trades.<p>At the opening of the <a href="http://www.providenceathenaeum.org/" target="_blank">Providence Athenaeum</a>'s Benefit Street building in July 1838, Brown University President Francis Wayland gave a two-hour speech which, in the overwrought style of 19th-century oratory, described the new institution as "a fountain of living water, at which the intellectual thirst of this whole community may be slaked." Although the Athenaeum was a membership library—readers had to pay an annual fee for the privilege of borrowing books—it was, in an era before the proliferation of public libraries across America, designed to serve every stratum of Providence society.</p><p>Today, there are only <a href="http://new.mercantilelibrary.com/membership-libraries-group/" target="_blank">about 18 membership libraries</a> left in America, most of them located in those Northeast cities that are generally more inclined to hang onto relics. And perhaps more than any other institution, <a href="http://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/" target="_blank">libraries in general are grappling</a> with their place in a society that is increasingly dependent on and obsessed with technology. Many have coped with the shift away from printed books by becoming neighborhood computer labs, after-school centers, and even social-service clearinghouses.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="627" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/15079027526_135b6c9dfe_k/8acefd202.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">The main reading room of the Athenaeum (freda/Flickr)</figcaption></figure><p>The Providence Athenaeum, on the other hand, has stubbornly resisted change—and that may be the key to its continued relevance for this city of just under 180,000.</p><p>The Athenaeum, a Greek Revival edifice that still gives its solid wooden card catalog pride of place, looks and feels like it belongs in another century. But it has lately become a vital part of 21st-century civic life, thanks to a lively Friday night salon series with discussion topics ranging from the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky's <em>The Rite of Spring</em> to the Rhode Island quahog clam industry.</p><div class="city-makers-embed-code">
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<p><span style="line-height: 1.52941;">The series is curated by Christina Bevilacqua, the Athenaeum's director of programs and public engagement, and it has apparently tapped into a widespread yearning for intellectual engagement, packing upwards of 120 people each week into a ground-floor reading room about half the size of a tennis court.</span></p>
</div><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="522" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/ChristinaBevilaqua_1/bbe039a95.jpg" width="350"><figcaption class="caption">Christina Bevilacqua (Frank Mullin)</figcaption></figure><p>"I think Christina is the best thing that ever happened to the Athenaeum, and to Providence," says John Chiafalo, who has been attending the salons since the beginning. "There's so much, culturally, that I wouldn't have gotten involved with on my own."</p><p>Though, as a 61-year-old retiree, Chiafalo at first appears to be exactly the sort of person who would typically spend his Friday nights discussing Proust, he argues that he is not one of the "East Side elite." Chiafalo lives in a working-class neighborhood on the other side of town, and he didn't get a college degree until he was 40. "But no one at the Athenaeum looks down on me," he says. "It's intellectual without being academic."</p><p>Bevilacqua brings to the Athenaeum her own diverse sensibilities—her resume includes stints as a social worker and hat designer. When she was hired in 2005, the Atheneaum was struggling. It had lost about a fifth of its 1,000 members after, in a desperate bid to raise money, the board voted to sell a prized original edition of John James Audubon's <em>Birds of America</em>.</p><p>Membership, which costs $200 a year for a household or $165 for an individual, has since rebounded, even as Bevilacqua opened all salons and book clubs to non-members.</p><p>"This is a long-term game," Bevilacqua says, explaining why, unlike other membership libraries, the Athenaeum has not kept its most popular programs behind a pay wall. "We have to make the case for support."</p><p>Despite its recent success, the Athenaeum is as cash-strapped as any nonprofit cultural institution, and it struggles to attract the younger people whom it might one day rely upon for support. Recent efforts to reach the under-50 crowd have been working, however—a book club for younger people called "The Contemporaries" was filled to capacity before regular salon-goer SueEllen Kroll, 38, had the chance to sign up.</p><p>"Hopefully, someday there will be a slot that opens," she says wistfully.</p><p>Kroll started going to the Athenaeum's salons several years ago because, as grants director with the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, she had helped to fund some of them—including a multipart series on <em>Moby Dick</em> that is now legendary among salon-goers. Over the years, Kroll's organization has arranged for many of the independent researchers it supports to present at salons, a civic forum that offers an alternative to the insularity of academia and can provide much-needed exposure for local scholars and artists.</p><p>"Christina has a bird's-eye view and the ability to connect with other institutions in the city, helping them to build audiences," Kroll says. Salon attendees are broad-minded and relish learning about the work of outside groups, "even though it might be a small Latino theater no one's ever heard of," she adds.</p><p>This past fall, the salon series went on hiatus, as Bevilacqua was appointed to a fellowship with the <a href="http://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/" target="_blank">John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage</a> at Brown University, to research the history of salons and think about the role and future of the Athenaeum's series. As part of her fellowship project, she and a research assistant are surveying several dozen frequent salon attendees about their experience, both at the salons and since the break began. Many have admitted to feeling bereft, and are looking forward to the series' return in February.</p><p>Bevilacqua says some have compared their Friday night attendance to a sort of secular church-going. "There's something about a regular place that gives people the opportunity to come and think about the community they live in, to think about ideas," she says. "We're reclaiming that public mission from the 1830s."</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedFrank MullinA salon at the Providence Athenaeum A Providence Library Becomes a Sort of Secular Church2014-12-18T07:00:00-05:002014-12-18T07:00:16-05:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-383833Athenaeums&mdash;membership libraries&mdash;might seem like fusty relics of the 19th century. But the Providence Athenaeum has become a lively center for intellectual engagement.<p>Boston's <a href="http://www.innovationdistrict.org/" target="_blank">Innovation District</a> is so new that on Google Earth, this former working waterfront—set on one-and-a-half square miles of landfill—is still just a wasteland of surface parking. But those windswept lots are quickly disappearing as office towers and condos spring up to house the start-ups, tech companies, and hip young workers that the city has been trying to lure since before former Mayor Tom Menino christened the neighborhood with its optimistic name in 2010.</p><p>The district is already home to some 200 companies—established biotech operations, venture capital firms, and buzzy robotics start-ups—along with a gigantic convention center, hotels, trendy restaurants, Irish bars, and the city's Institute of Contemporary Art. While the neighborhood has had no problem drumming up business, manufacturing the sense of community one might find in a place that developed more organically is another matter.</p><p>"The Innovation District has all the charm of an office park in a suburb of Dallas," the <em>Boston Globe</em>'s Pulitzer-winning architecture critic, Robert Campbell, wrote last month, in a scathing <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/15/innovation/qhy7BbQiICARapsRJGsjaL/story.html" target="_blank">front page review</a> of the district's boxy new buildings. While the area's architectural merits might be up for debate, the coldness that Campbell wrote of also speaks to the difficulty of building an urban neighborhood from scratch.</p><p>His review noted one bright spot, however: District Hall, a single-story, 12,000-square-foot building with big windows and a funky slanted roof. In the words of its 27-year-old general manager, Nicole Fichera, it is meant to serve as the Innovation District's "living room."</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="573" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/District_Hall_Exterior1_Photo_Credit_Gustav_Hoiland_Flagship_Photo/636c1d9e4.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">The angular, metal-panel-clad building was the first in the new Seaport Square development, part of the Innovation District. (Gustav Hoiland/Flagship Photo)</figcaption></figure><p>District Hall began with Menino (who died in October) calling for an "innovation center," a nebulous concept that a design team working for Boston Global Investors, developers of 23 acres of the new district, was forced to figure out on its own. Fichera, who trained as an architect and has been involved with the Innovation District since she was a co-op student at Northeastern University, was in those early meetings.</p><p>"It was intoxicating to be part of something so big," she says. "But it was a confusing process. The mayor's office wanted a gathering space for the innovation economy, and that could be 100 million things. We had to figure out what the space would be, imagine everything that would take place here. We did these brainstorming sessions, like, 'What the heck is this?'"</p><div class="city-makers-embed-code">
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<p>What the designers at the Boson firm of <a href="http://www.hacin.com/" target="_blank">Hacin + Associates</a> eventually came up with is something like a college campus's student union. Open 7 AM to 2 AM on weekdays and from noon on weekends, District Hall was built with private funds and is run by a local non-profit called the <a href="http://vencaf.org/district-hall-boston/" target="_blank">Venture Café Foundation</a>. It houses a restaurant, a coffee shop and bar, a public lounge with tables and armchairs, and a set of leasable conference and event rooms. The walls are all writeable, and the Wi-Fi is strong and speedy.</p>
<p>It's a place where a start-up founder can meet with potential investors, where office workers can bring their laptops for a change of scenery, and where, as people actually move here, neighbors can socialize over a beer and a plate of roasted duck tacos.</p>
</div><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="628" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/District_Hall_Interior1_Photo_Credit_Gustav_Hoiland_Flagship_Photo/dd4d7d450.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">The building's student-union-like interior (Gustav Hoiland/Flagship Photo)</figcaption></figure><p>The building's <a href="http://goo.gl/NCuND6" target="_blank">interior</a> was meant to be flexible, Fichera says, but when it came to the outside, the designers were very clear about the role District Hall would play in this new neighborhood. The interesting angles were meant to signal civic space, in the manner of a museum or concert hall. Sticking with a one-story layout gave the building a human scale, and it was important that District Hall be freestanding so that it would look and feel independent from the office towers going up around it.</p><p>Fichera left Hacin to take a job focusing on the Innovation District with the city's redevelopment authority in 2012, and then became District Hall's manager when it opened last year. She acknowledges that it's unusual for a designer to manage a building she helped to conceive. But after spending so much of her short career on District Hall, she found it tough to let the project go.</p><p>"I've had the chance to be here and thinking about it since it was just a concept," she says. "I remember sitting in design meetings, talking about 'What do we do here?' I could see it, and I remember thinking at the time, 'I could totally run this.'"</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="350" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/12/Nicole_Fichera_headshot/fa63158f4.jpg" width="350"><figcaption class="caption">Nicole Fichera (Matthew Manke)</figcaption></figure><p>She laughs at what she says was the "arrogance" of a 22-year-old, but after spending four years on District Hall, eventually she became the right person for the job. And that meshed well with Fichera's idea that architects, if they really want to understand how people use the spaces they create, ought to stay involved after construction is complete.</p><p>In Fichera's eyes, District Hall is still an experiment, a case study in place-making that she expects will be adopted and adapted in other cities as the "innovation district" <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/about/programs/metro/innovation-districts" target="_blank">trend</a> takes off. And whatever the verdict on the rest of the district's architecture, she is proud of her own corner of it.</p><p>"[Menino] used to talk about 'relationship architecture,'" says Fichera. "There's a lot you can do to build community regardless of the physical context. But you can also make the physical context conducive to relationships."</p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedGustav Hoiland/Flagship PhotoBoston's District HallIs This What 'Innovation' Looks Like?2014-12-12T17:15:00-05:002014-12-15T12:31:28-05:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-383695As cities go wild for innovation, Boston&#39;s award-winning District Hall tries to distill the concept into physical form.<p>Perfect weather and sandy beaches might spring to mind when a mainlander thinks of Honolulu. But this metro area of nearly 1 million people is far from paradise for those who get stuck in its notorious traffic, which competes with Los Angeles for the title of <a href="http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/keyfindings.asp">worst in the United States</a>.</p><p>"Anybody who flies into Honolulu and drives into town—heading to Waikiki, for example—you are immediately struck by the H-1 freeway, seven lanes of traffic going in the same direction," says Dan Grabauskas, executive director and CEO of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation ­(HART). "And if you land at rush hour, it's a standstill. It surprises people when they come here, to see how much congestion we face."</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/08/Future_Transportation_homepage_promo2/hero.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">The Future of Transportation</a></h4>
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<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>HART is working on an alternative to that miserable commute: a 20-mile elevated rail line—a first for the islands—that will whisk passengers between downtown and outlying communities in a fraction of the time it currently takes to crawl through rush hour traffic. With the first trips planned for 2017, the $5.2 billion <a href="http://www.honolulutransit.org/">Honolulu Rail Transit Project</a> is expected to reduce congestion by 18 percent, taking as many as 40,000 automobiles off the road and replacing them with a fleet of four-car trains that can accommodate up to 800 riders, with racks for both bicycles and surfboards.</p><p>But surfboard storage will not be the project's only unique feature; this will also be the <a href="http://perkinswill.com/news/perkins-will-makes-long-term-commitment-to-hawaii.html">first fully automated wide-scale urban transit system</a> in the United States. Instead of human drivers, a centrally-located computer system will control stops, departures, and speed, and even open and close doors. Operation will be cheaper than for manually-driven rail, says Grabauskas, and he also expects it to be safer. "There are transit systems where driver error has caused collisions or other incidents," he says. "The driverless operation we have is going to be very safe."</p><p>It should also be more reliable. Eliminating the unpredictability of human drivers will help trains stick to their schedules, and consistent acceleration and deceleration means they can safely run closer together. Over the course of a 20-hour daily schedule, system managers will also be able to increase the frequency of service in response to demand, without having to call in additional personnel. "We can make pretty nimble service changes," Grabauskas says, "almost literally with the press of a button. Driverless systems offer tremendous advantages."</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="529" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/09/Station_boarding_area/bcb4d6efa.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">HART's new trains (rendered above) will be the first truly driverless ones on a wide-scale U.S. transit system. (Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation)</figcaption></figure><p>Despite his enthusiasm—and that of Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell and local business leaders—truly driverless transit has <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/03/rare-non-tragic-chance-revisit-idea-driverless-trains/8739/?utm_source=feed">yet to catch on</a> elsewhere in the United States. While many urban systems have some level of automation, including New York's subway and the San Francisco Bay Area's BART, right now only people-movers like the AirTrain at JFK Airport and the monorail along the Las Vegas Strip run without human operators. That's not the case elsewhere in the world. Driverless trains have become fairly common in Asia and in Europe, where Paris automated its oldest and busiest Metro line in 2012, increasing passengers per hour <a href="http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/blogs/tracktalk/issue-7/paris-metro-how-to-successfully-implement-automation-on-existing-line/">by 25 percent</a>.</p><p>Honolulu's system is modeled on the Copenhagen Metro, which has been operating since 2002 and won "best subway" at the international MetroRail conference in 2008. Grabauskas reports "a tremendous amount of interest" in Honolulu's system among his mainland U.S. colleagues. But Louis Sanders, director of technical services at the American Public Transportation Association, says not to expect established systems to go driverless any time soon.</p><p>One might expect transit worker unions to be the primary obstacle—after all, a driverless system puts drivers out of work. But while unions have balked at taking drivers off automated trains <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-26381175">in London</a> and <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/automated-train-rolls-article-1.389778">New York</a>, Sanders says it isn't labor that's holding back automation. Nor is it safety questions, despite the 2009 crash of an automated (though staffed) Metro train in Washington, D.C., which killed nine people and forced the transit agency <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dr-gridlock/wp/2013/06/11/metro-not-ready-to-run-trains-in-automatic-mode/">to run trains manually</a> until the aging automatic system can be updated.</p><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="509" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/09/2014_Airport_Station_Entry/25be93462.jpg" width="940"></figure><figure class="full-width"><img alt="" height="626" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/09/East_Kapolei_Station_1/a135ec665.jpg" width="940"><figcaption class="caption">Renderings of the Airport (top) and East Kapolei stations. (Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation)</figcaption></figure><p>"I think people will be accepting of it," says Sanders, noting that driverless trains are generally equipped with obstacle detection capabilities, closed-circuit cameras, and emergency communication systems. "People get on people-movers at airports." The big issue, he says, is that despite the potential savings down the line, it's expensive to convert existing systems into driverless ones. The technology in place for semi-autonomous transit in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco was put in place years ago and would take loads of money—and political will—to overhaul completely. "To take advantage of driverless, you have to change everything you do," Sanders says.</p><p>In Honolulu, which is starting from scratch, automation was perhaps the easiest thing about making the system a reality. The rail line was "decades in the making," says Jennifer Sabas, former chief of staff to Hawaii's Sen. Daniel Inouye, who <a href="http://www.honolulutransit.org/rhs/media-center/news-releases/20131001-nr-senator-daniel-k-inouye-honored-for-his-work-on-honolulus-rail-transit-project.aspx">secured $1.5 billion in federal funding</a> for the rail line before his death in 2012. Sabas now serves as executive director of Move Oahu Forward, a business- and labor-backed non-profit organized to support the line in the face of opposition from residents and politicians who argued that the elevated tracks and stations would loom over the landscape, and that the system, which will be funded by a half-cent surcharge on the state's general excise tax in addition to the federal contribution, simply cost too much. "Since there was such an issue over whether to even build a train, the driverless aspect hasn't gotten much attention," says Sabas.</p><p>Getting car-centric Honolulu to embrace rail was a struggle, but now that construction is visibly underway, attitudes appear to be changing—especially since traffic on Oahu is only getting worse. "You have communities where people have to sit in traffic for an hour and a half," says Sabas. "Polling data shows that those who live in the most congested areas and are fighting traffic every day are the most supportive of the rail line."</p><p>But it's not just commuters who stand to benefit. Some 8 million people visit Hawaii every year, and for many of them the new driverless rail line will help set their first impression of the islands. That's something many in the local tourism industry are banking on—and it might also help make the case for driverless transit elsewhere in the United States.</p><p><em><em>This article is part of <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/">'The Future of Transportation,'</a> a CityLab series made possible with support from <a href="http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Rockefeller Foundation</a>.</em></em></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedHonolulu Authority for Rapid TransportationA rendering of a rail canopy at a new HART station, which is scheduled to begin operations in 2017.Honolulu Is Building America's First Fully Driverless Transit System2014-09-17T08:03:23-04:002014-09-17T08:03:24-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-380292But there are doubts about whether it will inspire other U.S. cities to follow suit.<p>PHILADELPHIA—Rachel Yoka pilots her Nissan Rogue through five lanes of honking cars and trucks, then down a narrow alley near City Hall. It's a densely built neighborhood, laid out in the 17th century for pedestrians and the occasional horse and buggy, not the automobile traffic that chokes the grid at lunchtime. Of course, parking in Center City is always a challenge, but that's actually why we're here.</p><p>"I love this place!" says Yoka, pulling the car into a bay at the base of an unassuming nine-story building, designated by a discrete sans-serif sign as "The Lift at Juniper Street." We climb out, Yoka swipes a credit card at a touch-screen kiosk, and in a few seconds we hear the whir of machinery as a set of doors open at the rear of the bay and the car slides through. When we race around the corner to peer through a wall of tall windows, we see the vehicle rising on a robotic dolly, a sort of elevator for cars which slips it smoothly into a narrow slot several stories up.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/05/promo_sr_transportation_624x384/hero.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">The Future of Transportation</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>This automated garage is ideal for dense urban areas, says Yoka, vice president of program development at the International Parking Institute, based in Alexandria, Virginia. A Philadelphia-area native and self-described "super parking nerd," her niche is sustainable parking, something that many people, upon first hearing the phrase, assume is a contradiction. But for a building designed to house cars, says Yoka, The Lift at Juniper Street is surprisingly green.</p><p>"You don't need ventilation, you don't need lighting," she says. "You have space savings in terms of floor-to-floor ratio." Because there's no need for ramps or aisles, The Lift can accommodate twice as many cars as a traditional garage of the same size, and the cars are lifted into position with their engines off, cutting down on emissions. The idea has already caught on in Europe, and Yoka calls it "up and coming" in the United States.</p><p>"From a sustainability perspective, we realize that parking is part of the problem," Yoka says. "But eliminating parking just isn't feasible. So we want to reduce the number of parking spaces that need to be constructed, and we want the ones that are constructed to be as green as possible."</p><p>Anyone who has driven in a city has experienced the frustrations of parking: the hunt for a spot, the wait to enter or exit a garage, the need to hoard quarters and dash out of a meeting to plug a meter. But parking doesn't just affect drivers. Massive garages with blank, unfriendly facades can drain the life out of a city block. Surface lots <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/how-parking-lots-became-the-scourge-of-american-downtowns/372207/?utm_source=feed">create barren craters</a> in city centers. The wrong amount of parking can mean more emissions: too much encourages unnecessary driving, too little increases congestion as drivers waiting for a spot circle and idle. But while ardent urbanists might dream of a future when cars are kept out of cities altogether, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.</p><p>"The initial response is, 'Green parking—isn't that an oxymoron?' " says Paul Wessel, executive director of the New Haven-based Green Parking Council, which in June released its <a href="http://www.greenparkingcouncil.org/certification/">Green Garage Certification Standard</a>, modeled on the LEED program for green buildings. But once we admit that parking isn't going away, he says, we might as well figure out how to make it more efficient and less harmful.</p><p>"It's about helping parking become part of the solution," he says, "rather than poster child for the problem."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>"My friends don't like to go through parking garages with me—they're like, 'Just shut up!' " says Yoka with a laugh. We've picked up her car at The Lift, and we're heading to North Philly to visit a new garage on the campus of Temple University.</p><p>Touring parking facilities was not always Yoka's idea of a fun afternoon. Her entrée into the professional parking world came in 2003, when she interviewed for a job in marketing with the Philadelphia architectural firm Timothy Haahs &amp; Associates, which specializes in designing parking structures.</p><p>"I'd never really considered it," she says. "But everybody needs it, across this wide range of industries. There's the private side, the public side. Parking for healthcare is different than, say, paid parking on the street."</p><p>Within a few years of taking the job, Yoka moved from marketing to research, conducting studies that looked at how the firm's facilities could be greener. She earned a LEED credential and accreditation from the Congress for the New Urbanism, and she became an evangelist for sustainable parking, leading development of the new Green Garage Certification Standard. She also edited <a href="https://www.parking.org/publications/green-book.aspx"><em>Sustainable Parking Design and Management: A Practitioner's Handbook</em></a>, which the International Parking Institute, the industry's largest trade group, published in June, just as Yoka was moving to her current job there. She believes parking can be more than what some might call a necessary evil.</p><figure><img alt="" height="827" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/08/6_Rachel_at_Hamilton_Square/eaafc15a8.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">More urban garages are incorporating ground-floor retail and architectural flourishes to make parking blend into walkable environments (above, Rachel Yoka outside Hamilton Square in Philadelphia, designed by Timothy Haahs &amp; Associates). (Courtesy Rachel Yoka) </figcaption></figure><p>Yoka takes a ticket and pulls into the new Temple garage, a project she worked on while at Haahs. Nearly a third of Temple’s students, faculty, and staff commute by car (as drivers and passengers), so there's a desperate need for parking on campus, she says. The four-story structure is a definite improvement over the surface lot that was here before. It packs more cars into a smaller area, but it also boasts high-efficiency lighting programmed to go off when daylight alone is sufficient, landscaping that conserves water, and preferred parking for electric vehicles. It was designed to LEED standards, says Yoka, although at present LEED <a href="http://www.greenparkingcouncil.org/certified-green-garages/what-about-leed">does not recognize parking</a>.</p><p>"They're not encouraging it," she says, "and I understand why. They want to promote alternative modes of transportation. Which was part of why the Green Parking Council developed the new rating system just for parking garages. It's pretty exciting stuff!"</p><p>The Green Garage Standard, laid out in a 195-page manual, includes points for everything from efficient lighting and renewable energy integration to bicycle parking and connections to mass transit. It also describes pricing, which <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/04/3-enormous-benefits-charging-right-price-parking/8772/?utm_source=feed">when set properly</a>, the group says, can reduce automobile commuting by up to 30 percent compared with free parking.</p><p>The industry is already embracing these standards, says Casey Jones, a former chair of the International Parking Institute and current vice president at Standard Parking, which manages more than 4,000 facilities nationwide. Sustainability is good for business, he says, especially as customers begin to realize that parking can be greener.</p><p>"The pressure is good for us—we have to deliver," he says. "We've gone a long while not being a contributor to the environment or the community, building poorly-designed garages that are seen as eyesores, that don't contribute to sustainability. We've got to correct those mistakes, and we're doing it every day."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>Despite efforts to be greener, the parking industry may always face skepticism—not only because of its history, but because of its purpose. In Chicago, for example, the Standard Parking-managed Greenway Self Park garage, with its wind turbines and electric car charging stations, was roundly <a href="http://newcity.com/2012/10/16/checkerboard-city-green-parking-or-greenwashing/">mocked by bloggers</a> and even <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-11-21/news/ct-met-kamin-green-garage-1121-20101121_1_parking-garage-wind-turbines-parking-floors">the <em>Chicago Tribune</em></a> after it opened to great fanfare in 2010.</p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/08/4_4921680098_582928e3a3_b/47bdcf638.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Mocked as "greenwashing" after it opened in 2010, Greenway Self-Park in Chicago has wind turbines, electric car charging stations, energy-efficient lighting—and a controversial logo that shows a car emitting leaves from its tailpipe. (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hoknetwork/4921680098">HOK Network / Flickr</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>"It's a classic case of 'greenwashing,' tacking a few energy-saving features onto a building whose function is inherently unsustainable," wrote the <em>Tribune's</em> Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Blair Kamin. Pointing to the garage's logo, in which green leaves come out of a car's exhaust pipe, he noted, "the decoration seems designed to remove guilt from the act of driving. 'At least I'm parking my energy-sucking SUV in a building that's saving Mother Earth,' customers can assure themselves."</p><p>Green roofs and wind turbines might attract attention, but they're just a distraction if sustainable parking advocates aren't truly trying to reduce demand, says Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based non-profit that advocates for sustainable development. "If you're going to put in parking, there's a lot of things you can do that will be greener. But why do we need as much parking as we have? First, make a decision to do with less of it. Then, make it as green as possible."</p><p>Yoka agrees that we need fewer, smaller garages. "Honestly, an overbuild of parking is absolutely the worse investment," she says, "both from a sustainability standpoint and a profit standpoint."</p><p>One solution is <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/12/new-york-search-right-number-parking-spot/646/?utm_source=feed">parking maximums</a>. Most cities still have parking minimums for new development, but in an effort to increase density and transit use, some, including Portland and Seattle, have set limits on how much new parking can be built. That's a constraint that the parking industry is happy to take on, Yoka says. "The greenest parking space is the one that's never built."</p><p>Parking can be reduced through shared-use agreements, with office workers parking in a garage during the day and apartment-dwellers using the spots at night, for example. Well-managed garages can also discourage excessive driving by providing price incentives for high-occupancy vehicles, or by facilitating multimodal commutes with convenient links to transit. Demand-responsive pricing—like San Francisco's <a href="http://sfpark.org/">SFpark program</a>—can be used to discourage people from using their cars <a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/06/does-san-franciscos-smart-parking-system-reduce-cruising-for-a-space/373351/?utm_source=feed">at the busiest times of day</a>.</p><p>"These are not the shiny, sexy elements of sustainability," says Josh Kavanagh, president of the Association for Commuter Transportation, who has led workshops in transportation-demand management for the parking industry. "But parking management policies can encourage comparatively green commuter behaviors. By meeting people where they are and encouraging them to stretch just a little, we can get them to move toward more sustainable behavior." </p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>"Once you start to look for parking facilities, they're everywhere," says Yoka, as we cross the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia's famous 30th Street Station, on the last leg of our parking tour. "Some are good, some are bad, but you just can't get away from them."</p><p>Near the train tracks, we pass a series of crowded surface lots surrounded by chain-link fences—land that, one hopes, is waiting to be developed into something better. We pass traditional garages with boxy tiers of bare concrete, the kind that present an unwelcoming façade to drivers and pedestrians alike. That's something developers are moving away from, says Yoka. In fact, urban garages are increasingly likely to include ground floor retail and attractive architectural flourishes. We stop at one with a fancy metal skin wrapped around the upper levels and full-size Fresh Grocer on the ground floor, complete with a sidewalk café where a few people sit drinking coffee. The market, says Yoka, was sorely needed when the garage went up in 2000. "It literally changed the character of the neighborhood."</p><figure><img alt="" height="384" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/08/2_20120802_garage_pix21633_large/697db00d5.jpg" width="620"></figure><figure><img alt="" height="411" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/08/3_20120802_garage_pix21661_large/cce3e0396.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">The Green Parking Council looked to the solar-powered garage at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado when developing its Green Garage Standard. More than 200 spots are reserved for electric and fuel-efficient cars, as well as carpools. (<a href="http://www.nrel.gov/sustainable_nrel/buildings_garage.html">National Renewable Energy Lab</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>The store and the garage above it are busy, with shoppers pushing carts full of reusable grocery bags to their cars. How many of them might have taken the bus or walked if not for the convenience of a parking garage is difficult to say. But it's clear, in this urban neighborhood and across the country, that Americans love their cars.</p><p>That's something that advocates for sustainability will have to come to terms with, says Paul Wessel, with the Green Parking Council. "If you think taking guns away from us is hard, imagine taking our cars away!" he says. "In America, we think that we should be able to drive as fast as we want and park out front. It's almost a birthright."</p><p>We might be moving away from that sensibility, says Yoka, arguing that city drivers, when nudged in the right direction, are coming to accept that they might need to walk at least those last few blocks. Still, she admits, even someone as conscious of parking and its issues as she is will circle past her destination once or twice, just to check for that perfect parking spot.</p><p>"It's always nice when you get that rock star space!" she says with a guilty laugh.</p><p><em><em>This article is part of <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/">'The Future of Transportation,'</a> a CityLab series made possible with support from <a href="http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Rockefeller Foundation</a>.</em></em></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedThe LiftBy parking cars automatically, The Lift in Philadelphia can have twice as many stalls (220 on 8 floors) as a conventional parking structure.One Woman's Quest to Design Parking Lots People Don't Hate2014-08-05T07:00:00-04:002014-08-05T07:00:32-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-375472Rachel Yoka believes parking can be more than what some might call a necessary evil.<p>With more than 300 daily departures, the Shinkansen bullet train covers the 300 miles between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan's two largest metro areas, in as little as 2 hours and 25 minutes. To an American tourist, the <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/05/new-yorkers-sadly-lopsided-scorecard-tokyo-transportation/2022/?utm_source=feed">journey can feel futuristic</a>. But the world’s first high-speed line, which now carries nearly 400,000 people a day, actually began running half a century ago.</p><p>It's a galling fact to consider upon returning home, where the fastest American train is Amtrak's comparatively pokey Acela Express, plodding 400 miles from Washington to Boston in about 7 hours. While bullet trains now race across Europe and Asia, American high-speed rail has a long history of delay and disappointment. President Obama's plan for a national network stalled when Republican governors <a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/11/how-republicans-killed-americas-high-speed-rail-plan/7458/?utm_source=feed">refused to accept</a> federal money. A $68 billion project is <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/california-high-speed-rail-finally-finds-the-funding-it-needs/372976/?utm_source=feed">underway in California</a>, but that line, which voters approved six years ago, isn't slated to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco until at least 2029.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/05/promo_sr_transportation_624x384/hero.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">The Future of Transportation</a></h4>
<div class="go"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">Go</a></div>
<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>Richard Lawless, who as a C.I.A. officer posted in Tokyo in the 1980s was a frequent Shinkansen passenger, has long found America's failure to embrace high-speed rail "mind-boggling." But today the former <a href="http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/04/06/2003355486">Bush administration official</a> is in a position to change things, as chairman and CEO of <a href="http://www.texascentral.com/">Texas Central Railway</a>, a private company that plans to link Dallas and Houston with a 200-mile-per-hour bullet train as soon as 2021. The venture just might be high-speed rail's best hope in the United States.</p><p>"The project has been progressing below the radar, very quietly, very deliberately, over the last four years plus," says Lawless. It's now undergoing an environmental impact study that will take between two and three years, but Texas Central, whose backers include Japan's JR Central railway, has already conducted its own extensive research. The company, originally called U.S.-Japan High-Speed Rail, looked at 97 possible routes nationwide before concluding that Texas was the ideal place for a high-speed line — and that healthy profits could be made in long-distance passenger rail, a travel mode that for the past 40 years has existed only with the help of massive government subsidies.</p><p>"Texas is special," says Lawless. He lists among its advantages a flat, rural landscape, staggering growth potential, and a "business-friendly approach." He adds that "as city pairs, Dallas and Houston are pretty unique in the United States." The cities are 240 miles apart, a distance Lawless describes as a "sweet spot" for high-speed rail, where it beats <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/01/what-eurostars-success-means-california-hsr/938/?utm_source=feed">both air and highway travel</a>.</p><p>The company is working under the assumption that both metro area populations will double by 2035, but their economies are already linked to an extent that that the railway's backers can count on a steady flow of traffic between them. Crucial to the line's success will be the 50,000 people who commute regularly between Dallas and Houston, currently a five-hour schlep in traffic or an hour-long flight on Southwest Airlines — which, when factoring in security lines and travel to and from the airport, takes longer than the 90-minute ride, downtown to downtown, promised by Texas Central.</p><p>Maureen Crocker, executive director of the Gulf Coast Rail District, a joint effort of the City of Houston and surrounding counties to expand rail service, says the line will serve a real need if it can get cars off the region's highways. She points to a recent <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/columnists/begley/article/Roads-are-high-priority-hard-spending-sell-5436273.php">Rice University survey</a> that found congestion to be the number one concern of Houston residents.</p><p>"Yes, our economy is booming, but we are actually paying a price," says Crocker, who is also an aide to Houston Mayor Annise Parker. "There are major roadways here that are at gridlock. People are very aware of the problem and need for rail."</p><p>This is not the first time high-speed rail has been proposed in Texas. Twenty years ago, another private developer, Texas T.G.V., spent some $70 million toward an inter-city system, which was halted largely because of opposition from Southwest Airlines. There has been some speculation that Southwest could fight Texas Central as well, but so far the airline has kept mum, and it's possible that the train could even be a boon for air travel, if it helps take pressure off busy airports.</p><p>"There's really nothing not to be excited about," says Sam Merten, a spokesman for Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, who along with the mayors of Houston and Fort Worth has endorsed the project. "It seems like it's a win-win for everybody."</p><figure><img alt="" height="413" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/06/Seating_First_Class/4fb9feff5.jpg" width="620"><figcaption class="credit">Courtesy JR Central</figcaption></figure><p>Much of the mayoral enthusiasm can be chalked up to the fact that the project will cost constituents nothing. Texas Central plans to fund construction — which early estimates put at about $10 billion — exclusively through private investment. It would consider federal financing, says Lawless, but it will not accept subsidies even if the line fails to turn a profit.</p><p>"We will not structure this company in any way that will come back and be a burden to the state of Texas," says Lawless. "That is the risk that we take as a privately-funded, privately-owned and operated company." That risk is outweighed by the advantages of staying private, he says. "It just gives you the flexibility to execute the project on schedule, probably with a lot more freedom of action than you would have if it were a government project."</p><p>While Japanese passenger rail is private (and profitable), the U.S. passenger rail industry declined significantly through the 20th century, and federally-funded Amtrak eventually took over all long-distance passenger service. But Dallas-Houston is not America's only planned private passenger route — <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/the-triumphant-return-of-private-us-passenger-rail/372808/?utm_source=feed">All Aboard Florida</a>, an express railway that would link Orlando and Miami, is scheduled to begin service by 2016. If these lines are successful, Lawless believes other private investors will begin to sense demand, as Americans who have become accustomed to the grind of traffic and the hassles of air travel get a taste of the ease and convenience rail can offer.</p><p>"People don't realize how dependable it is," he says. "In Japan, the average delay is less than a minute, and you can board five minutes before it leaves. … I think what will happen is, if we can demonstrate a successful high-speed rail system on this corridor, there will actually be agitation for it in other viable corridors."</p><p><em><em>This article is part of <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/">'The Future of Transportation,'</a> a CityLab series made possible with support from <a href="http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Rockefeller Foundation</a>.</em></em></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedCourtesy JR CentralTexas Central Railway envisions a Dallas-Houston high-speed rail line modeled off the JR Central's Shinkansen.The Big Texas Plan to Copy Japan's High-Speed Rail Success2014-06-19T07:30:00-04:002014-06-19T07:30:38-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-372984Texas Central Railway intends to build a Houston-Dallas line with private money.<p>SOMERVILLE, Mass.—On Saturday nights, Davis Square bustles with the young and fashionable. They're seeing an independent film at the restored movie palace or taking in a comedy show down the street. They're slurping ramen at a Japanese restaurant, sipping a beer at a sidewalk table, or people-watching on the busy central plaza. Tucked into a corner of Somerville, a city of 77,000 just northwest of Boston, Davis Square is a prototype vision of urbanism — dense, transit-oriented, walkable, and a real estate agent's dream. A typical one-bedroom apartment rents for as much as $2,000, and single-family homes now sell for <a href="http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Somerville-MA/54458_rid/1000000-_price/3856-_mp/days_sort/42.408106,-71.100147,42.378155,-71.134779_rect/14_zm/0_mmm/1_rs/">upwards of $1 million</a>.</p><p>Van Hardy lived here in the mid-1980s. When he looks back on the last three decades, he's amazed at how things have changed. "Davis Square was kind of a depressed area, a lot of crime," the 64-year-old says. The neighborhood began to transform after metro Boston's light rail and subway system — known as the "T" — extended into Somerville in 1984. The new Davis Station offered an easy commute to Harvard, MIT, or downtown Boston via the T's Red Line. "As soon as the Red Line came in, there were more college kids, young professionals," Hardy recalls. And as the neighborhood grew more desirable, Hardy's rent went up, forcing him and many of his neighbors to move across town.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/05/promo_sr_transportation_624x384/hero.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">The Future of Transportation</a></h4>
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<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>Now, Hardy is worried he might have to move again. Over the next eight years, Somerville will get <a href="http://www.greenlineextension.org/documents/about/ProposedMap/map_010213.pdf">six more rail stations</a>, as a long-anticipated extension of the T's Green Line is finally built through the heart of town and a new station opens on the Orange Line. While working-class residents are looking forward to the convenience of having transit within walking distance, many also remember what happened after the Red Line came to Davis Square. "There's just this instability, not knowing when the rent is going to go up," Hardy says.</p><p>Hardy's fears are well-grounded. In February, <a href="http://www.mapc.org/managing-change-somerville-dimensions-displacement-report-released">a report</a> from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional agency that serves metropolitan Boston, warned that rent for apartments near the new Green Line stations could rise by as much as 67 percent, and that condo conversions could accelerate starting even before the new T stops open. Developers are already using the Green Line extension in their sales pitches, and renters who live near planned stations report that their landlords have begun to raise the rent — in some cases by 100 percent or more.</p><p>Anxiety over new transit projects in established neighborhoods is nothing new, although historically it was more often felt in wealthy areas, where people worried about rising crime and falling property values. Today gentrification is the more likely scenario, with dense urban living becoming desirable again. <a href="http://nuweb9.neu.edu/dukakiscenter/wp-content/uploads/TRN_Equity_final.pdf">A 2010 study</a> out of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University looked at demographic shifts in neighborhoods across the country after new light rail or subway stations opened. Compared to the rest of their metro areas, 60 percent of the neighborhoods saw an increase in the proportion of households making more than $100,000, and 74 percent saw rents rising faster. Ironically, as incomes rose in these transit-centric neighborhoods, car ownership also became more common.</p><p>The researchers traced the same pattern in cities as different as Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Houston, and it will likely be replicated along many of the <a href="http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2014/01/05/openings-and-construction-starts-planned-for-2014/">737 miles of transit</a> currently under construction across the United States and Canada. In Somerville, the trend could affect thousands of low- and moderate-income residents, forcing those who need transit the most to relocate to car-dependent suburbs. That worries not just renters, but anyone who cares about sustaining a diverse city and building efficient mobility networks.</p><p>"Opposing new transit is like cutting off your nose to spite your face," says Danny LeBlanc, chief executive of the Somerville Community Corporation, known as the SCC, a nonprofit that is leading the effort to find solutions to the looming housing crisis. "But the fear among longtime residents is that they and their kids just won't be able to afford to enjoy it."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>Somerville was, for much of its history, home to working-class Italian and Irish families — a densely populated city of low-rise apartment buildings, subdivided Victorians, and the fading vestiges of light industry. When mid-20th century white flight sent those who could afford it scurrying to the suburbs, immigrants from South Asia, Brazil, Central America, and the Caribbean replaced them. That diversity is a point of pride for city leaders, and it may be why Somerville, unlike many cities in similar circumstances, is working to anticipate and mitigate the impact on housing costs.</p><figure><img alt="" height="722" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/05/11/somerville-walkshed.jpg" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">Current plans call for six new MBTA stations in Somerville (above, along dotted green lines), with nearby rents rising 67 percent by some estimates. (MAPC)</figcaption></figure><p>"The positives of investing in public transit far outweigh the negatives," says Mayor Joseph Curtatone, a son of Italian immigrants who grew up in the city's Prospect Hill neighborhood. "But the one thing we don't want to do as we prosper is lose our soul."</p><p>How to strike that balance is still up for debate. Curtatone's administration has published redevelopment plans for areas around the new transit stops that would increase density and encourage construction. These have proven controversial, in part because they could involve invoking eminent domain. But Curtatone is adamant about the need to alleviate pressure on the city's limited housing stock by simply building more. The goal is at least 6,000 new units by 2030, including 1,200 designated as permanently affordable. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council, meanwhile, says Somerville may actually need as many as 9,000 more units (a third of them for low-income households). City officials say their number is open to revision.</p><p>"The plan's dynamic," says Curtatone. "There's one clear solution: We need more housing stock."</p><p>More housing may not be enough, however, if the current trend toward luxury construction continues. At present, all new projects are required to set aside at least 12.5 percent of units as affordable. Some in town argue that share should be higher, but regardless of the figure, those units are distributed to low-income families through a lottery, leaving the middle class to compete on the open market. To help that population, city officials and the SCC are discussing ideas to stabilize prices for existing homes, money for which could come from the affordable housing trust funded by the city's recently increased linkage fee, a $5.15-per-square-foot charge collected from large commercial developers.</p><p>"We've never been one to shy away from a good idea," says George Proakis, Somerville's planning director. Still, he notes, affordability is just one of the city's priorities. "We're trying to focus on a balance between allowing development to occur while also making sure that people who live here can afford to stay."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>As city officials work to strike a balance between growth and sustainability, some residents are already beginning to see their neighborhoods change. Felix Lugo immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic 18 years ago. For most of that time, he has lived in a neat Victorian apartment building in Somerville's Union Square, which will be one of the first neighborhoods to welcome a new T stop, as early as 2017.</p><p>"The speculators are running through this neighborhood," says Lugo in Spanish, through a translator. "My perception is the middle class here is going to be gone. It's going to be all wealthy people. Bourgeoisie." Looking out his fourth-floor living room window, he points to a building on the corner that was recently converted to luxury lofts. A convenience store called "Lovely Spot" sits vacant, Lugo says, since the owners were unable to keep up when the landlord doubled their rent. A friend who ran a beauty salon closed up shop for the same reason. Even the church around the corner is gone, he says. "They doubled the rent! On a church!"</p><figure><img alt="" height="576" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/05/11/somerville-rent.jpg" width="600"></figure><p><em style="font-size: 10px;">Rents along the green line extension into Somerville could go up as much as $580 a month at some stops. (MAPC)</em></p><p>Lugo, a member of the Somerville Community Corporation, has been working to organize his neighbors and take their concerns to the city, which he says has done a poor job communicating with residents and business-owners about redevelopment.</p><p>"On the one hand, I would like to believe that the city or the authorities want to keep the residents and businesses here," Lugo says. "But I have doubts, for a simple reason: They haven't been talking to us."</p><p>City officials say they have been doing their best to listen. City Hall joined with the SCC to host a series of well-attended workshops earlier this year, at which residents were encouraged to air their concerns and propose solutions. At one recent meeting, held in an elementary school cafeteria, residents' proposals ranged from rent control — a long shot — to a requirement that new developments include family-sized housing at below-market rates.</p><p>"The market rate is for people who are making more money," says Martine Dreux, a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant who has been searching in vain for an affordable apartment big enough for her and her daughter. "You can't spend your whole check on rent and then starve."</p><p>At one of the workshops, Dana LeWinter, the city's housing director, told the assembled residents that their opinions would help set the agenda for City Hall, and she encouraged them to stay engaged.</p><p>"It's a matter of all hands on deck for this," LeWinter says later, in an interview at the City Hall annex. While the city is open to creative ideas, "often people will look to city government and say, 'You guys have to solve this.' If there were an easy solution to displacement, I think someone would have found it. And I think we're well poised just because we're having this conversation."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>However Somerville's affordability conversation plays out, it is one that dozens of U.S. cities developing or expanding their transit systems must soon have. Washington, D.C., is bringing back a streetcar network in an effort to <a href="http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-on-foot/2012/02/the-business-implications-of-creating-a-37-mile-d-c-streetcar-system-14418.html">revitalize depressed neighborhoods</a>, but the project has become a symbol of gentrification and a magnet for controversy in a city that recently lost its black majority as the white population grew by nearly a third. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is building or extending several Metro rail lines that residents spent years fighting for, but landlords in Leimert Park — long known as a hub of African-American culture — <a href="http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/07/blackowned_businesses_already_being_pushed_out_of_leimert_park_ahead_of_the_crenshaw_line.php">have reportedly canceled leases</a> and sold buildings to speculators in advance of a subway station slated to open by 2019.</p><p>So far, only a handful of cities have tackled the problem directly, in most cases by snatching up land or housing before market-rate developers get to it. <a href="http://ui.uncc.edu/story/charlotte-transit-stations-subsidized-housing">Charlotte</a> and <a href="http://www.urbanlandc.org/denver-transit-oriented-development-fund/">Denver</a> set aside money to buy property around new stations in order to keep it affordable. Atlanta has an affordable housing trust fund for land around its <a href="http://www.citylab.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/05/can-atlanta-go-all-beltline/9036/?utm_source=feed">BeltLine project</a>, with 120 units created so far. In the San Francisco Bay Area, government agencies and private foundations set up a <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2011/03/24/mtc-affordable-housing-50-million-fund.html">$50 million fund</a> in 2011 to provide financing for affordable housing and certain retail and service projects close to transit — although so far the investment has centered around existing stations.</p><figure><img alt="" height="360" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/05/11/Davis%20T%20stop-cropped.jpg" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">A Hubway bikeshare stand just outside the T station at Davis Square in Somerville. (Amy Crawford)</figcaption></figure><p>In Somerville, Alderman Maryann Heuston, who grew up here in the 1950s and '60s, sees gentrification as a global trend — a reversal of the suburban migration that destroyed her childhood neighborhood. "I lost a lot of friends," she remembers. "When I was growing up, people couldn't get out of here fast enough." By the late 1970s, Heuston says, Somerville's commercial areas were "desolate" and its residential neighborhoods relegated to those who could not afford to leave. For years, the neighborhood around the Davis Square T-station was the only part of the city that seemed to thrive.</p><p>Sometimes lost amid today's controversy is the fact that Somerville — so often overshadowed by its larger, wealthier neighbors, Boston and Cambridge — fought for decades to bring the Green Line into town. Now that construction is finally about to begin, there is a sense among some that, just as an old injustice could soon be righted, another might be about to take its place.</p><p>"We're at a delicate point," says Heuston. "We want to be able to take advantage of all that this new world has to offer. But we need to make sure that the people who stuck it out are able to stay."</p><p><em><em>This article is part of <a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">'The Future of Transportation,'</a> a CityLab series made possible with support from <a href="http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Rockefeller Foundation</a>.</em></em></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedFlickr user Chris DeversDoes New Mass Transit Always Have to Mean Rapidly Rising Rents?2014-05-13T08:45:00-04:002014-05-22T10:18:20-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-363172U.S. cities big and small are struggling to welcome transit development while preserving affordable housing.<p>SYRACUSE, N.Y.—When Van Robinson moved from New York to Syracuse in 1968, one of the first things he noticed was Interstate 81, which runs along a 1.4-mile viaduct straight through the city's downtown. "I thought, 'This is ridiculous. Who in the world would put an interstate through the middle of a city?'" says Robinson. "I-81 is 855 miles from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the Canadian border. This is the only place where it goes through a city. It always bugged me."</p><p>Forty-six years later, Robinson now serves as president of Syracuse's Common Council and may finally be in a position to do something about the elevated highway that he has described as a "Berlin Wall" dividing the city's neighborhoods. The <a href="https://www.dot.ny.gov/i81opportunities/about">I-81 viaduct</a> will reach the end of its functional life in 2017, and the New York State Department of Transportation has decided that it is not worth the cost of rehabilitation. One way or another, the viaduct is coming down.</p><!-- START "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><aside class="callout special-report"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Series</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/citylab/2014/05/promo_sr_transportation_624x384/hero.png"></a></figure><h4 class="sans"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">The Future of Transportation</a></h4>
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<hr></aside><!-- END "SPECIAL REPORT" BOX --><p>City leaders like Robinson, along with downtown developers and advocates for smart growth, would like to see I-81 rerouted around Syracuse and replaced with a landscaped boulevard. But suburban business-owners and many of the 45,000 drivers who use the highway to commute fear that any change could hurt the local economy. It's a debate that goes beyond the immediate question of how Syracuse workers will get to work — to what kind of city Syracuse will be in the 21st century.</p><p> </p><p>Similar discussions are happening across the United States, says John Norquist, president of the Chicago-based <a href="https://www.cnu.org/">Congress for the New Urbanism</a>, which publishes an <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/11/death-row-urban-highways/411/?utm_source=feed">occasional</a> <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/02/death-row-urban-highways-part-2/1170/?utm_source=feed">list</a> of interstates ripe for demolition. Many urban freeways — a staple of mid-20th century <a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/01/what-interstate-highway-system-should-have-looked/8097/?utm_source=feed">car-centric development</a> — are beginning to fall apart, and today cities from New Haven to Seattle (not to mention others around the world) are taking the dramatic step of tearing them down. A former Milwaukee mayor, Norquist oversaw the conversion of an elevated highway to a boulevard there in 2002, following a model pioneered by Portland in 1978 and San Francisco in 1991.</p><p>"It's starting to happen all over the place, and there's a reason for it," says Norquist. "Freeways don't add value to cities. They're all about one dimension, which is just moving traffic. It's a rural form, visited upon the city, that destroys property values, commerce and vitality."</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>Syracuse is a city of 145,000 that sits in a snow belt just south of Lake Ontario. The brutal winters that frequently land it among the top five snowiest cities in the United States are a perverse point of pride for many residents. People here are not afraid to walk to work, school, or shopping, even with temperatures in the single digits. Still, pedestrians are a rare sight beneath the I-81 viaduct at any time of year. With few traffic lights and uneven snow removal, the area is a no man's land of on-ramps, parking lots and concrete columns.</p><p>"It's loud and it's dark — it's very foreboding and disconcerting to be underneath it," says Jason Evans, a 2008 Syracuse University graduate who works as an architect downtown and writes an urban planning blog called <a href="http://www.rethinksyracuse.org/"><em>[re]think Syracuse</em></a>.</p><p>Evans, who grew up in the Syracuse suburbs and never expected to stay near home, is the sort of young professional that the city struggled to attract in the second half of the 20th century, when it was hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs like so many other Northeast cities. In recent years, however, Syracuse has rebuilt its downtown neighborhoods. Armory Square, once a derelict collection of crumbling 19th-century buildings, now boasts bars and restaurants with four-star Yelp reviews and condos selling for upwards of $300,000. A new Connective Corridor of bike lanes and bus routes links the area to University Hill, home to 21,000-student Syracuse University.</p><figure><img alt="" height="399" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/02/17/shutterstock_166274273.jpg" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">Walton Street is part of Armory Square, a revitalized district in downtown Syracuse, New York. Photo by <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-9742p1.html">Kenneth Sponsler</a>/<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock.com</a></figcaption></figure><p>City leaders are proud of the revitalization, but they acknowledge that it has yet to reach every corner of town. Parts of Southwest, a predominantly African-American neighborhood just south of downtown, are full of abandoned homes and empty storefronts that seem miles from Armory Square or University Hill — although both are within walking distance. Some in Syracuse, including Robinson and Mayor Stephanie Miner, hope that tearing down 1-81, which runs beside and through the neighborhood, will reintegrate this isolated, impoverished area while spurring economic development citywide.</p><p>"We have a big scar going through our city right now, which has done damage in all sorts of ways," says Miner. "It separates our biggest area of economic energy — University Hill — from our downtown, which is also an area of economic energy."</p><p>The 43-year-old Miner, who was <a href="http://www.syrgov.net/Mayors_Biography.aspx">elected in 2009</a> after eight years on the common council, has long been adamant that 1-81 is an impediment to the city's growth. The institutions on University Hill, including several hospitals and a medical school, have little room to expand, she explains, while the land around the viaduct sits fallow, given over to tall grass and parking lots.</p><p>"It's a dead zone," she says. "But if those institutions felt like they could safely move down the hill into that area, then you're going to get the requisite services that those employees would want." Restaurants, coffee shops and stores will follow, she believes. Then property values, tax revenues, and quality of life will increase for the city as a whole.</p><center>
<p>• • • • •</p>
</center><p>Not everyone in greater Syracuse supports tearing down I-81. The sprawling car-oriented development that changed the character of American cities in the post-interstate era had winners as well as losers. Today, many of those winners fear a reversal of fortune.</p><p>Mark Nicotra is the town supervisor of Salina, a suburb of about 34,000 people northwest of the city. At his office, in a two-story brick building surrounded by mid-century tract homes, Nicotra has an aerial photo from the 1950s hanging on a wall. It shows the newly built interchange of I-81 and I-90 — the New York State Thruway — surrounded by farmland. Once those interstates were built, says Nicotra, that farmland was soon developed into a dozen hotels, along with restaurants, gas stations, and other establishments that cater to travelers. Rerouting traffic east of Syracuse, which would have to happen if the downtown viaduct were removed, would destroy those businesses, he worries.</p><p>"I-81 is like our Main Street," he says. "If you take that away, you're going to see a deterioration of our tax base."</p><figure><img alt="" height="399" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2014/02/17/OCL-060209-02.JPG" width="600"><figcaption class="caption">The Interstate 81 Viaduct in Syracuse. (Courtesy Onondaga Citizens League)</figcaption></figure><p>To prevent that scenario, Nicotra and local hotel owners formed a group called <a href="http://www.savei81.org/">Save 81</a>, which is dedicated to preserving I-81's current route. They've been joined by elected officials and business owners from other suburban communities, as well as some businesses in the city proper, <a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/06/dead-pipe-dream-day-syracuses-destiny-usa/2202/?utm_source=feed">including Destiny USA</a>, a mega-mall surrounded by a vast sea of parking lots that draws shoppers from as far away as Pennsylvania and Ontario. Save 81 has attracted some surprising allies, including local union leaders.</p><p>"It's about quickly getting to work, saving on gas, and getting home," says Ann Marie Taliercio, president of the Central New York Area Labor Federation/AFL-CIO and Unite Here Local 150, which represents area hotel employees. Like many of the workers she represents, Taliercio lives in the suburbs and commutes into the city. "Our economic life," she says, "has been built around the infrastructure we have now."</p><p>Some African American leaders have also joined Save 81. Reverend James Thompson, a pastor at Fountain of Life Church on the west side of town, says many people are still upset that a black neighborhood was razed for the original construction of I-81. "There was a lot of uprooting of homes; the land had to be taken and people were placed in substandard housing," says Thompson. While city leaders believe taking down the viaduct would only remove a psychological barrier that has isolated low-income areas, Thompson worries about what could happen if a boulevard—and the accompanying development—takes its place.</p><p>"This is the same old gentrification situation all over again," he says. "If a boulevard comes in, the people that live there today, they're going to be priced out."</p><center>
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</center><p>A consensus might be a long time coming, but there's still plenty of time for the various sides to make their cases. Right now, the state DOT is <a href="https://www.dot.ny.gov/i81opportunities">studying four options</a> as part of a lengthy, federally mandated environmental review. They include rebuilding the elevated highway with wider shoulders and straighter curves to comply with modern safety standards; rebuilding I-81 as a depressed roadway, like parts of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York; hiding the freeway in a tunnel, in the style of Boston's Big Dig; or rerouting through-traffic around downtown Syracuse and replacing the viaduct with a boulevard that would be tied into the city's grid.</p><p>These options are laid out in a series of posters at a former Carnegie Library downtown, and state officials are presenting the choices at public meetings. Soliciting public opinion is a required part of the environmental review, but DOT says that while it's received at least 250 comments, most of them are vague on which option is preferred. Many simply urge the department to make the right decision.</p><p>Residents may be hesitant to choose one of the options because several unknowns remain. While the department has found that the I-81 viaduct carries about 80,000 vehicles every day, of which only about 10 percent is through-traffic, there's still no solid information on how each of the alternatives would change driving times. (At present, census data shows the average commute in the region is <a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_5YR_S0801">about 17 minutes</a>, compared to <a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_5YR_S0801">25 minutes</a> nationwide.) There are also no firm cost estimates provided for any of the current options, although most observers believe the tunnel would be prohibitively expensive. And while a new viaduct would have to be wider than the current interstate, it's unclear how much private land DOT would seize to build it.</p><p>New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald says more information will be available soon. And while the decision will ultimately be made in Albany, she says, Syracuse residents should realize that their opinions "count for a lot."</p><p>"In the past, projects such as these only looked at transportation. This will look at community impact first," says McDonald. "Back when this portion of the highway was built, what I've heard from people is that the federal government asked for their input and then didn't use it. That is not going to happen this time."</p><p>Should that promise hold, Syracuse residents will have the chance to help shape their city for next 50 or 100 years, a charge that people on both sides of the debate take very seriously. Jason Evans, the architect, says the younger generation is paying special attention. "If the highway just gets rebuilt as is, it will send the message that we're going in the wrong direction," he says. "It's a small piece in the puzzle of rejuvenating the city. But it's an important one."</p><p><em><em>This article is part of <a href="http://www.citylab.com/special-report/future-of-transportation/?utm_source=feed">'The Future of Transportation,'</a> a CityLab series made possible with support from <a href="http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/" target="_blank">The Rockefeller Foundation</a>.</em></em></p>Amy Crawfordhttp://www.citylab.com/authors/amy-crawford/?utm_source=feedCourtesy Onondaga Citizens LeagueThe Future of Urban Freeways Is Playing Out Right Now in Syracuse2014-02-18T10:25:00-05:002014-05-22T11:03:23-04:00tag:citylab.com,2014:209-362527As I-81 nears the end of its functional life, a city struggles to decide the best way forward.